The 13th

by John Everson

  Promises don’t bring coordination however, and when her foot caught in the lower reaches of the blanket, Brenda went over the edge of the bed, letting out a slight shriek as she fell and smacked her temple on the carpeted floor. She rolled her face away from the nap of the carpet and stared upward into the black shadows of the ceiling. Above her, hovering in the dark, she saw the woman.

  Busty and barely clothed—wearing only a black strip across her breasts and leading down in a T to her waist, the woman looked like a dark angel. Her cleavage was laved in crimson, and her face speckled with weeping tears of blood. Above her, gray-blue wings gently fluttered in the air, veins bulging in muscles like blue worms on death.

  …In the name of the nether and the scum and the syphilitic…

  Brenda’s heart froze at the sight of the angel…or demon. Yet, the medicines that numbed her from reality also seemed to save her from fear. She shook her head at the creature’s whispering voice, and gasped only two words in answer: “Fuck you.”

  As the blue stars cleared from her head, Brenda crawled toward the faint light she saw slipping in through the bottom of the bedroom door. Above her, the demon continued to speak, alternating from words in some foreign tongue to simple declarations that Brenda could understand—and didn’t at all like.

  …Xudei’ ah Siet du ven. I will lick the blood from you like a mother, and you will taste me like a lover…

  Brenda slammed her head against the door as she scrabbled to stand up, but the pain helped clear some of the fuzz, and she used the moment to slap her hands on the door and wall and pull herself up to the knob.

  …You will open your veins to me, and I will drink your hate forever…

  With a trembling unsure hand, she grasped the knob and turned. Ever so slowly, it began to follow the lead of her fingers.

  …Every sin I will share…

  “Go fuck yourself,” Brenda hissed, and slipped between the jamb and the half-open door to lie under the glare of the lights in a long hallway.

  Behind her in the dark, the voice continued.

  …I will suck dry every child you bear…

  Brenda pulled the door shut behind her, silencing the demon. She pressed her back to the door and took several long, deep breaths, willing the fog to clear. The light from the hallway made her eyes water, and the patterns in the long stretch of carpeting blurred and twined in her head. She blinked and blinked to straighten it (and herself) out, and then slapped her cheek with the palm of her hand three times in rapid succession. The hall echoed with the cracks, but after the bright flashes cleared from behind her eyes, Brenda felt more in control. Holding the wall for support, she rose to a standing position, and cautiously moved down the hallway.

  She didn’t know why she was awake now. There was no way of knowing how long she’d been here, but she had the feeling that it was a long time. Regardless, she was awake, and she intended to get out of here.

  Wherever here was.

  Brenda fought the vertigo and crept along the hallway, one hand on her belly, the other on the wall for support. She counted down her progress with the numbers of the rooms: ten, nine, eight…She toyed with the idea of opening one of the doors to see what or who was inside, but the thought of having to grasp the knob, and turn it, and push the door open…made her opt to simply stagger forward, curiosity unheeded. When she neared the stairwell at the end of the hall, she began to move even slower. The buzz of voices wafted up from below.

  Brenda dropped to a crouch, and crawled across the carpet to rest her head against the cool metal of the stair railing. She tried to see whom the voices belonged to…but the stairs wrapped around, and the landing was invisible from upstairs. It sounded as if there was at least a dozen people down there…maybe more.

  Good, she thought. If the doctor is occupied, maybe that will make this easier. Of course, going down this way isn’t happening.

  Brenda pushed away from the railing and started to turn around to go back down the hall the way she’d come. Her stomach began to feel queasy as she passed rooms nine, ten and eleven. It had probably been days since she’d walked more than a couple steps, she guessed. And the drugs couldn’t be doing her guts any good. Biting her tongue to give her the pain jolt she needed to keep going, Brenda steeled herself and passed room twelve and turned the corner.

  The hand came out of nowhere, and clamped around her mouth. Brenda’s eyes went wide and she bit down hard on the skin of the hand that held her, but instead of letting go, a hand yanked on her hair, and pulled her out of the hallway, and out of sight.

  Into room thirteen.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “The guests are arriving,” Amelia announced. She stepped around the corner from the stairway, two-inch black heels clicking on the stone floor of the basement as she came.

  Rockford looked up from his study of the baby in crèche two and grinned. “It’s almost time. I can hardly believe it. It seems like we’ve been getting ready for this forever.”

  She sidled up to him and licked a lobe of his ear as a hand caressed his back. “Everything is ready in the chapel,” she promised. “The candles are lit, the food is ready…there is wine and rum and every other liquor under the sun.”

  Rockford laughed. “Let the orgy begin!”

  Amelia stepped between him and the baby. She took his hands into hers and stared up into his eyes. Even now, more than a year after she’d first met him, those eyes still made her thighs tremble. So hard, so powerful. And she had won that power for her own. Tonight was the proof.

  “This is the best place, the only place we could hold this ceremony,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.” Her voice betrayed the seriousness of her intent. “They failed here, twenty-five years ago, but they were amateurs. We are more prepared. We are ready. And the residue of the souls they spilled still permeates the walls of this very building like blood. It will bolster our own effort, to help make our offering a success.”

  “They did something right last time,” Rockford said. “Because whatever they called through, never completely left. We’ve been seeing ghosts since the day we walked into this place.”

  “Lower-level devils,” she agreed. “But not Ba’al or Astarte. Not the incantations of the Thirteenth.”

  He pointed at the row of baby incubators against the wall. “Well, we’re ready to call Astarte and Ba’al to incorporate all the way this time. We have the blood, and the wine, and the excess. We have the mothers, and the babies. And the Thirteenth. Now all we need are our guests.”

  Amelia’s eyes sparkled in the dull candlelight. “I’ll send them down,” she promised.

  When she walked away, Rockford couldn’t help but follow the shapely curve of her ass through the black satin fabric of her ceremonial robe. It trailed low to her ankles, and even had a hood in the back, which she still wore down. But what made it really work for Amelia was the way she draped it around her. She didn’t just wear the robe, it wore her. She’d tied a sash tight around her waist, accentuating her curves. From the thick golden rope that rippled against her belly hung a half dozen small white pendants. If you’d looked closer, you would have seen that they were actually skulls. Human skulls.

  And if you’d looked even closer, you’d have seen that they weren’t simply replicas of human skulls, they were actual denuded bone. They were not fully formed, and ranged in size from a pebble to a shot glass, yet each one hung and jangled against each other at her hips like a ghastly wind chime.

  Rockford shook his head, as he remembered harvesting and helping her cure each tiny head for her ceremonial outfit. These were no ordinary ornaments of death.

  These were the skulls of fetuses, taken from their mothers while still alive.

  Of course, by the end, neither mother nor fetus had lived to tell tales. Each one of them lay in waiting just down the hall, their bodies acid-washed, but their souls ready to be released in calling.

  Rockford turned his attention back to the babies who waited for t
he night. He reached in a hand to one of the cradles and thumbed the infant’s chin thoughtfully as it gurgled and stared at him with wide dark eyes.

  “Tonight’s the night, little guy,” he said. “Goo-chi-goo-chi-goo.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  David pulled the hand brake and slowed the bike as he approached the turnoff for Castle Lodge. Traffic tonight had been heavy for the ridge, and the last five cars that had passed him had turned onto the gravel road that led to the asylum.

  Something was up tonight.

  Peering behind him to make sure no cars were approaching, he turned onto the narrow road and stared down the lane. Through the protective screen of the trees, he could make out the glow of brake lights ahead. After a moment, they went out, and the path turned to unbreachable shadow again.

  He preferred the shadow. The red light only meant that Brenda and now Christy were in trouble. Something was about to change. There was a gathering here tonight. And David didn’t like the import of what that could mean for the women behind the thirteen doors.

  Women that included Brenda. And now Christy.

  Cautiously he pedaled down the lane, cringing at the crunch of the wheels on gravel. He imagined they could hear his approach inside the doors of the asylum. And then the beams of another pair of headlights out on 190 filtered through the trees to light the way ahead of him, and David swore. He leaped off the bike while it was still in motion and pulled it down to hide in the tall grass of the ditch beside the gravel road. His groundskeeping work hadn’t extended yet all the way to the highway, and he thanked God for that as he lay flat on the earth, hidden by a two-foot-high stand of grass and weeds. The headlights had turned onto the lane and shivered and bounced as the car crunched down the narrow rutted road toward him.

  Was it his imagination, or was the car slowing as it approached? He hugged the ground tighter, willing his body to sink into the warm earth. His breath caught as the car reached his hiding place, headlights blinding as twin suns in the pitch of night. His heart stopped for a moment as the car seemed to slow further, but then it was easing past, and as David looked up, he recognized the black-and-white panels of a police squad.

  Straining to see inside the car as it passed, he just barely made out that there were two heads in the front of the squad, and the one in the passenger seat, closest to him, looked disturbingly familiar.

  A woman’s curly gray hair shone briefly in the light reflected off the forest leaves, and David bit his tongue from calling out, “Aunt Elsie?”

  And then the car was gone, and pulling into an empty space amid a row of cars now lining the front entryway of the asylum. In a moment, the echo of two car doors slamming shut filled the air, and David could just barely make out the silhouettes of two figures walking up the steps of the asylum. For a moment the front columns of the old hotel were bathed in light as the door opened, and then with a snap, the two figures were gone, and David’s eyes struggled to adjust again to the subtle shades of night.

  He pulled his bike out of the weeds and slowly pedaled a few more yards along the gravel path before stopping again. The unkempt weeds changed to mowed grass, and the forest retreated from the edge of the road as the path opened to the circular drive of the entry gardens of the old hotel. Realizing that he couldn’t exactly ride his bike right up to the front door, David stepped off, and rolled the bike down into the ditch a second time, laying it down in the first stand of uncut grass.

  There were at least a dozen cars parked in front of the asylum, more than he had ever seen. They filled the open space that ringed the topiary garden in the center of the circle drive. David slipped away from the visible entryway though, and stole around the back of the hotel past his gardener’s shed to the back door. There were more lights on than usual inside, he noticed, and the wells that protected the basement windows glowed.

  What the fuck was going on in there tonight? The image of Dr. Rockford’s bloodied hands raised into the air after reaching inside the womb of a woman in the basement flashed across the back of his eyes and David cringed.

  His hand shook as he pressed the key into the back door of the asylum. He held his breath as he turned the knob and eased the door open.

  But he needn’t have worried about making noise. As soon as the door opened, the din of voices spilled into the night around him. Still, David was careful as he pulled the door shut behind him.

  He stole along the wall of art toward the center of the asylum, and the pictures seemed to leer at him with the echo of conversations ahead. One in particular caught his eye. The new one, with its garish color splash, a crimson wound that looked something like a baby…and something like roadkill.

  Its distorted eyes shone like black marbles in the dim light, and the skin of David’s neck crawled when he looked at it.

  There were people milling about in the center reception area of the old hotel, just at the base of the winding stairs that led to second floor. The floor where Brenda was. There was no way he could reach her now, David realized. All he could do was wait.

  Slipping down to a crouch, he leaned against the wall and bit his tongue. In front of him, people milled about, sipping from wineglasses and filling the room with the din of excited conversation. It looked like it could be a long wait.

  Heart pounding, and stomach clenched with concern, David wondered how long he could stay secreted here, before he couldn’t wait any longer. He had to get to Brenda…but the only way was through a crowd of people. He supposed he could just join the mob and pretend to be one of them…but to walk up the stairs in full view of a couple dozen people? No way.

  Frustrated, David pursed his lips, and leaned against the wall to wait.

  But he didn’t wait long.

  A shrill whistle cut the air. The hall suddenly quieted. David looked up for the source, and there was the granite-faced doctor himself, standing at the railing of the second-floor landing.

  Rockford.

  The fraud wore his white doctor’s coat, and his face beamed as he looked out over the crowd. Nurse Amelia stood at his side, a vision in black. Where Rockford looked austere and upstanding, dark pants sheathed in the trustworthy garments of the physician, Amelia was decked out in the raiment of a goth queen. Her raven hair slid down the black lace that edged a midnight dress. The lace slid across her neckline to plunge across highly visible cleavage. The body-hugging fabric clung to and accentuated the curve of her ass, and outlined the flare of her hips. Her waist was ringed in the homemade belt of baby skulls, which rattled and shifted with her every move.

  The dress barely crept lower than her ass, where it gave way to a tantalizing meld of white thigh and black fishnet.

  David caught his breath in spite of himself. He’d always thought she was attractive in the times he’d seen her in her nurse’s smock, but now, with eyes smudged in dark shadow and hips hugged tight, he realized that Amelia was not just cute…she was smoking hot.

  “Thank you all for coming tonight,” Rockford called out over the crowd. As Rockford began to talk, a girl decked out in a skintight skein of black even racier than Amelia’s cycled through the crowd, retrieving wineglasses and placing them on a circular plastic tray she balanced high in the air. David thought her lips looked coated not in lipstick, but in blood.

  “It has been twenty-five years since Castle House Lodge lived. You all know what happened then. Morgan attempted to stage the ceremony of the Thirteenth, and while he certainly succeeded in spilling plenty of blood here, he ultimately failed to complete the ritual. Tonight, what failed here then, will succeed. Amelia and I have followed every letter of the ritual up to now. The women in our asylum all carry children.

  “And tonight, their blood will provide the passage for Ba’al and Astarte. At last, after thousands of years, the mother and the father, sister and brother, will be joined as one, incorporated in our child.

  “The Thirteenth.”

  The throng below him began to applaud, and David realized then that he recognized m
any of them. Not all by name, but he’d seen most of them in town over the past few weeks.

  Erin, the druggist from the pharmacy. Mr. Cleary, the manager down at the grocery. And…it pained him to recognize, when he thought to look…Aunt Elsie, standing in the midst of the throng, tilting back a glass of amber wine and laughing as she spoke to a tall man in a white butcher’s apron.

  David realized the man wore a belt beneath the apron, and the glint of steel implements hanging from a sheath on his belt shone as he joined Elsie in laughing at some shared jibe.

  “And now,” Rockford continued, “it’s time for us to begin. Over the next hour, we will make our twelve offerings to Ba’al and Astarte, and at thirteen o’clock—the stroke of one A.M.—we will consummate the creation of that which you have all dreamed of for half of your lives. We are ready to bring them into the world, at last, to share in the flesh that they have celebrated since the dawn of time. Please, let Angeline lead you downstairs so that we can begin. After far too long, I’m pleased to tell you now…it is time.”

  The waitressing girl set down her platter of empty glasses at the reception window of the main office, and then strode through the crowd like a minx, shifting and bouncing her hips provocatively as she stalked straight toward the door marked with an unmistakable red X. In moments, the crowd began to follow her lead, and a stream of bodies disappeared from the main foyer of the asylum to its hidden depths.

  In minutes, the entire throng had left the main room of the asylum, and David found himself alone, crouching in silence.

  He hadn’t noticed when Rockford and Amelia had joined the throng, but he assumed they had gone through the red X as well. After all, the action was clearly slated to occur downstairs…Which led David to wonder if there was anyone left to rescue upstairs.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he mumbled, and forced himself up from his crouch to tiptoe through the center room and up the stairs.