The 13th

by John Everson

  TG shrugged. “Takin’ care of business,” was all he’d say.

  When the brick connected with the back of David’s skull, Billy raised his hand from the woman’s back to interfere. “What the fuck?” he complained. In a flash the smaller man was lying on the floor with the leechlike mother finally scrambling to get off of him. The mark of TG’s fist glowed on Billy’s cheek like sunburn.

  “No more shit,” TG declared, as he grabbed the blonde who seconds before had been hugging David. Still stunned by the sudden collapse of the man she’d just been embracing, Christy was easy prey for TG, who reached out to yank her by the hair before she quite grasped what was happening.

  The final look of comprehension in her eyes was filled with hatred. “You!” she spit before his meaty fist clogged her mouth.

  TG yanked her hair toward the ceiling to keep her in place, and the punch she’d been aiming at his face instead raised skyward. She went up on tiptoe to ease the pain of her hair pulling out of her scalp by the roots, and as she did, her body stretched provocatively in front of TG. An unintended, but still sensual result. Her breasts pulled tight to her rib cage as she scrabbled to grab at TG’s fist to ease its hold on her hair.

  “Nice rack,” TG commented.

  “Asshole!” Christy screamed.

  TG shook his head in disgust, and raised the brick over her head. “When will people learn?” he asked nobody in particular. He didn’t wait for Christy’s response, and a moment later she lay prone on the floor, the gash on her forehead looking more black than red as the heavy blood swelled to the surface.

  TG dragged both Christy’s and David’s bodies to a small closet door in the back of the room, and thrust them inside. Then he pulled the door shut, refastened the hook latch on the outside, and returned to where Billy still sat on the floor rubbing his face. The girl who’d formerly been attached to him like a growth was cowering in a corner.

  TG nodded his head toward the exit. “Now get up and let’s take care of some more business. I think we owe the doctor a house call.”

  The thing about TG was that he was direct. He didn’t screw around. While David had spent a half an hour easing his way up and around the room in an attempt to remain “invisible” to the ritual killers, TG didn’t waste any time with subterfuge. He strode right out of the locked room and down the hallway, exiting into the room full of naked, bloody cavorters. TG walked straight through that throng as if they were a room full of flies.

  The doctor and his whore were standing on the stage, overseeing the flaying of some other helpless chick.

  “Y’all like to tie people up, don’tcha?” TG asked. His voice, though quiet, seemed to boom through the room.

  The doctor looked up from drawing a razor across the woman’s tits. The line of blood ended just before her right nipple as he acknowledged TG’s unexpected presence.

  “I have some things I’d like to talk with you about,” TG continued.

  Rockford’s face didn’t hide his surprise. “I locked you up,” he began, but his lips never finished the sentence. Instead, TG’s four knuckles broke against the doctor’s cheek with a crack that echoed through the room.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “You did. That was your first mistake.”

  TG slugged the doctor again in the stomach, and then brought up a knuckle sandwich for good measure to Dr. Rockford’s lips. They swelled faster than collagen injections, and the man crumpled instantly. But that didn’t leave TG alone in his victory.

  No. The wrath of a woman is always worse than the fury of a man. And Rockford’s bitch was suddenly all over TG. A flurry of pounding arms and kicking feet assaulted him. Nails gouged painfully at his face.

  TG laughed at the attack. He reached out one calm hand in the middle of the storm of the century and popped the bitch one right between the eyes. Just like that, she went down like a sack of quarry rocks.

  TG rubbed sore knuckles in his free hand and stifled a small moan of pain. Bitch was made of coral. The flesh across the back of his fingers had marks. Still, the warmth that always swelled his groin after giving a good thrashing filled him, and a grin began to split TG’s face. He began to turn to see what other victims he could put the hurt on; the room was full of ’em. For the first time in his life, TG figured he had a license to pretty much fuck up anyone and everyone within arm’s reach. Hell, he’d be doing a service, probably get decorated for it—his name’d be in the papers and all that shit for single-handedly bringing down a dangerous mob of devil worshippers. And it would be fun…

  “Look out,” Billy warned from behind.

  TG turned just in time to see the glint of steel in the air. He was not in time to dodge it though, and the sharp bite of death whispered its victory in his head even before the pain arrived.

  A strangely tiny voice bleated from the body of a mean-looking heavyset man wearing a bloodstained apron and black latex gloves. In the cusp of those gloves, the man clenched the haft of the foot-long blade that was buried in TG’s throat.

  “Asshole,” the ironically feminine voice pronounced.

  TG’s unibrow twisted in anger, but all that came from his lips was a gurgle of red, red blood. His hands fumbled at the blade where it entered his throat, and then something like confusion swam across the anger in his eyes, and TG began to collapse, as if in slow motion. The Butcher held on to his blade, which slid back out of TG’s neck with a gentle glide in exact opposition to the force by which it had entered.

  Billy had backed away at the attack, not having a weapon handy. Now the Butcher advanced on him, and the smaller man’s feet tangled and tripped over the rutting bodies on the floor, most of them still oblivious to the turnabout battle going on near the altar of their worship. Once in the trance of ecstasy, the townspeople appeared completely absorbed in their degradations, and barely looked up as Billy fell backward over their twining hips.

  When he at last was cornered against the back wall, the Butcher smiled grimly at him. “You could have joined us,” he suggested, as he drew a thin line of beading blood from the tip of Billy’s chin all the way down to the base of his cock. Then he drew a transverse cut across the shaking man’s belly button, effecting an upside-down cross on Billy’s torso.

  “I will,” Billy promised. His voice trembled.

  “No you won’t,” the Butcher guaranteed, and aimed the tip of his blade at the center of the cross.

  At the front of the room, Dr. Rockford and Amelia had recovered, albeit with already purpling faces. Still rubbing his cheek, the doctor called out to his followers, “Let us continue. It’s time for mother number five.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  The night wind whispered warnings to Chief Maitlin. He ignored them as he sat on the porch of his daughter’s empty house and argued with himself about the best course of action. Could he trust her abductors to keep their word and leave Stacy out of this, so long as he stayed out of it? And how could he allow so many other people to suffer in exchange for his daughter’s life? Wasn’t it his job to protect them all, not just his daughter?

  After acting like a wooden Indian on Stacy’s peeling wood porch for hours, Maitlin finally stood up, joints creaking and moaning at the long inactivity.

  He shambled toward the cruiser like a zombie, still unsure about his plan. But once the keys were turned and the engine dragged the car slowly down the street, the chief felt the pall of desperation upon him even more than before. Castle Point appeared deserted as his cruiser slid slowly down its subdivision and then business streets. There were no long-hairs leaning against the outside wall of the Clam Shack on this, a perfect summer night. There were no dog walkers patrolling the sidewalks near Main, pooper-scoopers in hand. Normally the Canine Fecal Ballet was a prime activity at this point in the evening, just before bed.

  In his heart, Maitlin had known all along that the new proprietors of Castle House were tapping into the same demonic cult veins that had slathered the house in blood two decades before. He’d had a pretty go
od idea of what the reports of disappearing women over the past six months meant. What he hadn’t known was how much of the town Dr. Rockford had recruited. The last time this had happened, Maitlin guessed that a couple dozen townsfolk had been lured into the blood-drenched rituals of the Castle House basement.

  But this time, he feared that it was even more. After he watched an empty potato chip bag roll and skate across the empty asphalt of Main, Chief took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the bag had disappeared into the weeds at the side of the road. And Chief Maitlin gunned the engine of the cruiser and flipped a U dangerously close to it. In seconds he was doing sixty down the hairpin curves of the 190. After an Innovative Industries van passed him going the opposite direction, Chief killed the lights and began to slow down.

  The entrance to Castle House lay just ahead.

  The entrance to hell.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  “It’s working,” Amelia hissed in his ear. “Can you feel it?” She waved her hand in the air around them, where shadows seemed to coil and writhe like heat pockets.

  Rockford nodded, spilling a lopsided grin spattered with gore as he looked up from the latest sacrifice. He found it difficult to focus anymore on his partner, despite the fact that she was dressed only in blood he had spilled. It was difficult to focus on anything now but the blood. So much blood. So much more needed. The voices were loud now. Insistent.

  The air around them smelled of slaughter. Tasted of flesh. Moved like water. Whispered like dirty lovers.

  “Yes,” he said, as he drew a knife across the belly of Elisabeth, an Italian woman they had held captive for the past six months. Rockford had impregnated Elisabeth and then kept her quiet in the fog of drugs, allowing her consciousness to swim to the surface only rarely in the past weeks and months. Still, she had grown to know, with the depth of feeling that only a mother can know, that she was pregnant. In those brief periods of lucidity, Elisabeth had loved and feared for her baby. She had rubbed her abdomen and whispered to it over and over in her locked room until Amelia had rendered her comatose again, “Don’t worry, little one, I’ll protect you.”

  But Elisabeth’s world had mostly been a blur of shape and color with no meaning until this morning, when she had woken from the bad dreams to find ragged stitches across her abdomen. Then she had screamed herself hoarse.

  Rockford and Amelia had let her go on and screech her lungs out, because for this part of the ceremony, she had to be at least somewhat conscious. The old hotel had been awash in spine-twisting cries today as Rockford and Amelia made their way through the rooms on the second floor, freeing child after child from unripened wombs.

  So as Rockford cut into the stitches he had put in just hours before, Elisabeth wailed with rare cognizance.

  “Where is my baby?” she cried. “What have you done to my baby?”

  Amelia knelt at Elisabeth’s side and pressed both hands against the woman’s waist. She leaned in to kiss the mother, who responded by spitting. Amelia wiped the white foam from the blood on her naked chest and flicked it to the floor with her palm.

  “Your baby is in a better place,” she whispered.

  “I want to see my baby,” Elisabeth demanded.

  Amelia looked at Rockford, and the whites of her teeth showed through the blood on her face. She looked vampiric. “Shall I?”

  He nodded.

  Amelia stepped away, but Rockford didn’t stop tracing his knife across the thin flesh of the woman. “Would you like to hold her?” he asked.

  “It’s a girl?” Elisabeth gasped.

  He nodded. “Yes, though she won’t live for long outside of the incubator.”

  Amelia returned then, and held a tiny red-blotched baby to the mother’s chest. The infant twisted in her hands and let out a thin wail. “Here she is,” the nurse said.

  Elisabeth couldn’t hold the child with her arms tied up, but she tried to curl her body to the babe with a mother’s protective hug. Its body twisted between her breasts. “Put her back,” Elisabeth begged. “She needs to be in the incubator.”

  Amelia shook her head.

  “She would have joined you quickly anyway. Now…”

  Rockford touched the edge of a long silver blade to the infant’s back. The tiny baby began to cry, its face against her mother’s heart.

  “Now…she will go with you.”

  The basement of Castle House suddenly trembled with the gut-wrenching force of a mother’s scream that, just as suddenly as it began, was silenced.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The light from the open door blinded her for a moment, despite the fact that the room beyond it was lit only by candles. Brenda squinted and remained mute as a brawny man dragged in the body of a naked man. Seconds later, he was followed by a bony guy lugging an equally bare woman. The men dumped the two bodies unceremoniously on the ground and slammed the door behind them, apparently never noticing the fact that there was a girl in the back of the small room chained to the wall.

  After a moment had passed and she was sure the men weren’t coming back, Brenda called out to the newcomers on the floor in front of her in a loud whisper.

  “Who’s there?”

  The room remained silent. But their bodies were so close to her feet, she could hear the slight intake of their breathing.

  “Getting crowded in here,” she said to nobody in particular. Around her the air stirred. Hands seemed to slip in close to cup her breasts, as if someone had snuck up on her from behind. It felt as if the intruder had just come from a long, cold bath. Something brushed the hair on her arm in an icy caress and her skin goose-bumped.

  “Get OFF!” Brenda yelled at the air. “I may be naked and tied to a wall…but that doesn’t mean I’m easy!”

  She laughed, a little, at her own attempt at bravado, but the quiet of the room after her words died only made her insides clench harder. And they didn’t have any impact on the being in the room. The persistent cold hand slid up the inside of her thigh and Brenda shook and struggled to clench her legs together. But it was no use. When Rockford and Amelia had tied her up, they had left her spread-eagle; unable to touch her knees together. Now the invisible fingers capitalized on that, and gripped the tender flesh of her thighs without gentleness.

  “Ow,” she complained as the fingers squeezed her, and then she screamed out as an icy finger poked and pushed its cold way inside her.

  “Get OFF!”

  Brenda squeezed with every internal muscle she could control to expel the thing, but it slipped inside her like a steel spike, gouging up and in and sliding within. Its touch was hideous…She could feel the black ice spread through her groin and belly like some kind of bitter, nether anesthetic. It hurt and numbed her at the same time.

  “What the fuck,” Brenda moaned, and closed her eyes, as the world began to spin. She had been conscious now for the longest she’d been in weeks…and suddenly she felt unable to hold her eyes open any longer, despite the prodding at her insides by the cold prong, or the fact that two people had just been unceremoniously dumped naked and unconscious at her feet.

  “I feel like I’m going to puke,” she whispered. Inside, the coldness spread and spread until it overcame even her nauseated stomach, and then she shook her head and struggled to stay conscious…but the fingers reached her heart. And with one lone tear trailing down her cheek, beside the dirty pink lock of hair, Brenda—or that spark that thought of itself as Brenda—left the room.

  “I didn’t dump them here.”

  “Yeah, well don’t look at me.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Get her down. It’s time.”

  Hands felt along her sides, and through a haze of fog Brenda struggled to open her eyes. The fingers on her wrists and ankles were not cold, as the last touches she’d felt had been. This was different. She recognized those voices.

  A hand slapped her cheek and her eyes fluttered open instinctually.

  “Wake up, baby girl,” the male voice said. And
as that granite chin swam into focus, Brenda’s stomach sank.

  “Dr. Rockford,” she whispered.

  “At your service,” he said, and then she was in his arms, as Amelia cut loose the final bonds. She tried to kick away from him, but her legs wouldn’t answer. Instead, there was a strange heat in her calves, and then behind her thighs…and then the pins and needles hit. She toppled and Rockford easily caught her, slipping a hand to cup her buttocks. Brenda could feel the hard, moving bone that could only be his penis pressing against her belly as he shifted and supported her. His arms pulled her to him and his lips touched her forehead before he lifted her by the ass to stare into his eyes.

  “It’s you,” he breathed, his lips centimeters from her own. She could taste the blood on his breath.

  “After all this…it’s you.”

  “C’mon,” Amelia said, running a cool hand up Brenda’s bare back. “Let’s not lose the momentum. We have three more, and the hour is nearly done.”

  Rockford nodded at the nurse, and then bent his head to capture Brenda’s lips in his. Her eyes widened and she tried to block him out, but his tongue was thick and forced its way to the back of her throat before she could stop it.

  When he drew back, she stifled a gag and spit his taste back at him.

  Rockford only laughed. “Is that any way for the mother of Ba’al to behave?”

  Amelia answered for her. “Get used to it,” she said. “Ba’al and Astarte may spit all over you, and you better like it.”

  “You promised they’d do more than spit on us,” he laughed.

  “Oh, they will.” Amelia grinned, rubbing blood-slick tits against his arm. “I just don’t know that you’ll be able to keep up.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  David woke up with a boulder on his brain.

  Okay, maybe it was a brick.

  Okay, maybe just an ice pick that had somehow slipped inside his ear canal, pierced through the flesh and burrowed around in his brain until there was a big bloody hole in the middle of his skull filled with blood and…pain.