The 13th

by John Everson

  Maitlin pushed Ryan aside and stepped into the room of flesh. Because that was what the room had become. Flesh copulating. Flesh bleeding. Flesh fellated. Flesh filleted.

  The miasma of sex and blood hung like smoke, but in that cloud there was something else. Something dead that…wasn’t quite.

  Maitlin looked confused as he squinted through a fog that wasn’t quite candle smoke to see the source of the screams. The air seemed to move around him like a living presence. In his head, he heard not only the moans and cries of the room, but something deeper. Something like…laughter.

  At the center of it all, a man’s arm raised high in the air, and then brought a flash of silver down through the thick air to stop with a wet thunk in the neck of a naked brunette. But even as the horror of the action registered on the chief’s mind, something even worse blotted it out.

  Just to the right of the sacrificial stage, a body hung from ropes tied to hooks in the ceiling rafters. A body that the chief knew only too well…but didn’t want to be seeing like this here. Now.

  Stacy.

  “You bastards,” he breathed, as he saw his daughter’s body displayed like a pornographic bit of meat for the crowd, breasts spattered with the blood of the stage, pubes wild and damp in the heat of the hell that the basement had become. Her eyes were closed, and for that Maitlin was glad. But he panicked that her apparent unconsciousness might be death.

  “Stacy,” he called out without thinking. In a heartbeat, Ryan’s hand was over his mouth, and the chief shrugged him off.

  “Back off, Matt. I mean it.”

  “Chief, she’s all right. I made them promise that they wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “You made them promise?”

  “A bargaining chip,” Ryan said. “I told them if we held her here and warned you off as part of the deal, they’d be left alone for the ceremony. And Stacy would walk away free at the end.”

  “Are you mad?” Maitlin turned on Ryan, eyes blazing. “There’s going undercover, and there’s joining the gang. You had no right to drag my daughter into this. How dare you—”

  The chief’s words were cut short by yet another scream. And this time, the crowd responded with a chant.

  “Ba’al, Astarte. Ba’al, Astarte. Ba’al, Astarte…”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Maitlin whispered.

  “‘Hell’ is a good word for it,” a new, high-pitched voice whispered in his ear. At the same time, something cold and stinging kissed his neck.

  “It’s all right,” Ryan warned the man off.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Something bit the chief then, and he spun away from the bite…but as his hand slapped at the pain in his neck, he found it instantly wet with warmth.

  “What did you do?” he heard Ryan yell. But Chief Maitlin didn’t look back. He couldn’t turn his neck, didn’t dare. It felt hot and bloody, and his hand struggled to hold the pumping life in as his legs struggled to move him away from his turncoat captain and toward his naked daughter, hung like sexual meat for the whole room to sample.

  “Stacy,” he called, but it came out in a hoarse gurgle.

  He stumbled over a man and woman on the floor who rolled entwined as if they were joined at the elbows and knees as well as groins. His foot kicked the man in the face as he staggered toward Stacy, and the man responded with a punch to the back of his calf.

  Maitlin stumbled, and sank to the floor, one hand on his neck, the other grasping through bodies for the cement of the basement. He felt weak…dizzy. Something warm rubbed against the hand that steadied him on the floor and he looked to see the ribs and heavy breast of a fortysomething checkout woman from the grocery writhing beneath the body of a tattooed stick of a woman.

  “It’s wrong,” he gasped, and brought the hand away from his neck to steady himself on the floor, which seemed to spin away from his grasp. Again he heard laughter. From behind, he heard the captain’s voice arguing with someone, and then the chief found his legs again. He staggered up, slapping a hand to the wound on his neck to hold his blood, some of his blood, inside.

  “Stacy,” he called again, and this time, her eyes fluttered open as he stepped over another body to arrive at her feet. The ungodly shrieks on the stage were slowing to infrequent cries, and the crowd in the room still chanted, “Ba’al, Astarte, Ba’al, Astarte…”

  “Dad,” she cried out. “Oh my God, Daddy’”

  Maitlin staggered to stand at her dangling feet and grasped for her arm, tethered to the ceiling by heavy twined rope. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I’ll get you out of here…”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “So are you.”

  “No, they didn’t hurt me; they’ve just hung me out here…kind of like a bad load of laundry.”

  “I warned you to stay out of this,” Ryan’s voice came in his ear. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to get out of here, and then…”

  From the stage, Dr. Rockford’s voice boomed coolly.

  “Chief, thanks for joining us. Your daughter is delicious, if I do say so myself. You should try her out while she’s all trussed up. I’m sure you’ve always wanted a piece of her…or did you get some on your own?”

  Maitlin lunged away from Stacy toward Rockford, but Ryan grabbed his elbow with two hands and jerked him around. The chief staggered and almost went down. His clothes were dark with blood now, and he found it difficult to see. There were shadows at the edges of his vision, and faces that seemed to grin with teeth too long for their mouths.

  “You should have followed the deal,” Ryan hissed. “I didn’t want to have to do this.”

  “Stop them,” Maitlin gasped, crimson gathering like frost on his lips. “Matt…stop them, please.”

  Captain Ryan shook his head slowly, sadly. Then his hand came up in a sudden, deliberate jab to the police chief’s middle.

  Only, the hand was holding a knife. The Butcher’s knife. Twelve inches long if it was a millimeter. The captain twisted it back and forth inside the chief’s gut as his old friend’s eyes widened and his brows creased in confusion.

  “Our time here is over,” Ryan said. “Castle Point won’t need the police anymore. Ba’al will guard us soon.”

  The chief’s eyes only had a second to register their incomprehension when the blade connected with his neck from the uninjured side.

  The man with the apron and long knife grinned like a schoolkid at recess as his giant butcher knife hacked into the police chief’s neck, and easily brought it through the vertebrae to come out clean on the other side. The chief was still opening his mouth to speak when his head toppled to the ground, and was instantly gathered to the breast of an orgasming woman as if he were her lover. She kissed his still-warm lips and grinned, and her lover shook her from below, and the chief’s neck dripped hot on her breast.

  The chief’s headless body wavered for a moment and then slipped in slow motion to the ground.

  Ryan shook his head at the Butcher. “You could have let me finish it. He was my problem.”

  The Butcher grinned and said in a girlish voice, “Everybody needs a little help dealing with their elders…” He turned toward the woman hanging from the ceiling and crying in great, wet sobs. “…or their daughters.”

  “Not her,” Ryan said, bringing his blade, still wet with his old friend’s blood to the side of the Butcher’s neck. “I promised that she would be okay.”

  “Promises, promises.” The Butcher laughed. His voice was so high-pitched he could have auditioned as a ‘20s flapper, so long as you couldn’t see the portly frame and deep shadow of beard.

  “Would you rather I fuck her, or kill her?” The Butcher batted Ryan’s blade to the floor and held his own at the cop’s shoulder. “I fancy the bitch, and tonight’s the night for whatever you fancy. Isn’t that right?”

  He nodded at Elsie, who still lay prone on the floor where Ryan had left her when he went to deal with Maitlin.

  “Come back,” her lips mout
hed to him. They almost looked unreal…as if a shadow moved them while the thin, pale lips remained closed and dead. But Ryan only followed the call of the foggy words.

  Ryan felt the fight drain out of him then, as the voices behind his eyes whispered to him to fuck, fuck, fuck and the wrinkled breasts of his one perverse lust rippled on the floor before him. He never gave a second glance at the perfect globes of the chief’s daughter, who any man in his right mind would have paid a fortune to bed. The waves of demonic obsession rode over him, and in moments, he rode over Elsie, as the Butcher lifted a blade to trace the beads of sweat down the center of Stacy’s chest.

  “Yesss, my love,” he whispered to her as she quavered and struggled to pull her arms from the nooses anchored above her head. “You only get to lie with your father’s corpse once in life, I always say…” he told her as he cut her down and dragged her kicking and screaming to where her father’s dead body still bled in a widening pool on the floor…

  As the Butcher forcibly pressed her lips to the wound on the stump of her father’s neck, behind them, the nurse called for the next sacrifice:

  “To Astarte. A mother. The Eleventh.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Carrie Sanddanz felt something press against the back of her thigh. Something cold, like steel left outside on a winter’s night. She jerked away, but it followed her, creeping like a frozen noose up her leg to encircle the topmost skin of her leg…and then it released her…and moved to the middle.

  “No!” she screamed, and struggled to move away from the cold that engulfed her most private parts…but she could not move. She could only lie there and accept the fingers that slipped inside her and pressed her flesh with a cold, dead speculum that she could not, from any vantage point, see.

  “What the fuck!” she moaned, and stared at her middle, struggling to see the marionette strings. But they were inside her now, and she jerked and moaned to their rhythm, at the same time praying aloud for it to stop.

  And then the door opened and she heard the doctor’s voice. He had locked her in this tiny room just barely large enough to hold a cot. No windows. No light. It was horrible…but the threat of the darkness and its invisible creatures was still better than having to see the face of the doctor again.

  “So. Ready to take it to the next level?” Dr. Rockford’s voice asked. His body was a blur of shadow in the pitch-black of her cell.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t even know what this level is.”

  “This level is the important one,” he explained. “Here, we give it all.” He paused. “Or, at least, you do.”

  A blade came up to freeze her neck, but in the meantime, something cold pressed between her thighs.

  The bandage around her head throbbed as she moved to see him. “Haven’t you hurt me enough?” she asked.

  Rockford grinned a row of perfectly white teeth. “The only hurt that is enough is when there is no more possibility of hurt. You seem like you have plenty of capacity for more. Anyway, we’re going to find out.”

  He took her by the hand and pulled her from the cot. His touch was warm, but she realized that she preferred the bitter attentions of the ghosts that had forced themselves on her before the doctor’s presence. They could be trusted…or, at least…understood. They were predictable. She had no idea what Rockford was up to.

  He led her out of the tiny room and into a dark hall…but she could hear voices ahead. The din of a room filled with people. Only…these people didn’t sound like they were filling the place with a buzz from casual conversation. These were the kind of chaotic but insistent syllables that one expected from a porno movie…yet the number of voices and their intensity seemed to go beyond simple night movements. At one point, a group of them cheered, and a few steps later, the voices drew a collective gasp.

  Carrie’s skin crawled as she heard distant moans change to chants and then to a faraway scream.

  “What are they doing in there?” she asked her captor, who kept a grip on her hand tight as a vise. She could almost feel her bones bending.

  “Waiting for you,” he said.

  She tried to pull away, but his grip only tightened. She felt as if the bones in her hand would snap in a dozen pieces at any moment.

  “There is no place to run to,” he warned. “If you go back, you’ll only find yourself trapped in that room once more…and I don’t think you want that. Forward is how we’re doing this now. Move forward.”

  The first thing that hit her was the smell. As they rounded the corridor and entered the main room of the basement, the heat and humidity hit her like a wall. And within it, a scent of fertility and death mixed together like sin. Carrie gasped as she saw the Bacchanalian rites on the floor, but it was the smell that scared her—the room stank of evil. She could almost see the devils flitting through the shadows in the dark air, as candles flickered suggestively along the walls. And at the front of the room, the nurse stood naked, engaged in some strange ritual with another woman.

  As Dr. Rockford led her forward, Carrie recognized the girl as one of the hospital inmates she’d seen over the past few weeks. She had painted with her once in what the doctor liked to call “art class.” But it was more like bloodletting class, as all of the patients—most of them semicomatose—had slashed their hands and fingers and bled onto parchment in Rorschach designs that the doctor had collected and framed.

  “You will be remembered for your art,” he’d said, as he took Carrie’s halfhearted attempt to smear a picture of him on her paper. In the center of his stick-figure chest, she’d puddled a thick circle of blood with a point protruding.

  “Right,” was all she could say to answer him. The drugs left her barely able to mouth a single syllable. The same was true for all of the women…and so it was easiest to simply obey his orders—like, “Paint a picture in your blood for me.”

  Carrie had used her own deep humor to turn that command into, “Paint a picture in your blood OF me.” Her stickman writhed on a pointed stake. If he had caught the meaning of her crimson smears, he ignored it.

  The scene in front of her now resembled the intent of her stick drawing…only the victim was her former prison mate. The woman struggled to kick and punch at Nurse Amelia, but the defrocked nurse only grinned and pulled the woman closer to her in a twisted chest-to-chest embrace. A man in a butcher’s apron stood behind the struggling women, holding the patient’s arms in a vise grip so that her punches couldn’t land. In a moment, those arms ceased to fight, as Amelia’s hand plunged a long knife into the back of the other woman. She stepped back, letting the body slump into the Butcher’s arms and turned to the crowd, pressing the red edge of the knife to her lips. When she pulled it away and let her arm hang at her side, her tongue traced the bloody halo from her lips.

  “The eleventh mother,” she pronounced. “And”—she brought the arm back up in an attack stance and turned back to the woman who moaned feebly in the Butcher’s grasp, but otherwise didn’t move—“the eleventh child!”

  With those words, she plunged the knife into her in the opposite direction, this time straight through the belly.

  The room lit with one electrifying scream, as the woman’s eyes popped open, their whites so exposed that they seemed to pop out of her skull. Amelia pulled back the knife and a gush of fluid exited the wound behind it. Without ceremony, the Butcher dropped the body and with his foot, rolled it off the side of the makeshift stage.

  The room filled with the chant of “Ba’al, Astarte.”

  And then Rockford pushed Carrie to the front of the stage. “The hour is late and the minutes few,” he yelled. The throng around them hushed.

  “The blood of the mothers flows heavy in this room. But our time for blood is nearly done. The hour of the Thirteenth is almost at hand. For our last gift to Ba’al and Astarte, I give to you the twelfth mother.”

  Strong hands suddenly closed on Carrie’s wrists and yanked her up on the stage. Amelia ran one wet hand down her back as if in comfort
as she took over from Rockford. “There are only minutes left in the twelve o’clock hour,” she said. “And all of you must share in our last gift. The twelfth mother gives her life and her baby to all of us.”

  “But I’m not a mother,” Carrie gasped. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

  Amelia smiled and patted Carrie’s tummy. “Dr. Rockford is your boyfriend,” she whispered in her ear. “And don’t worry, I won’t tell him you slept through it.”

  Pulling away from Carrie, Amelia called out to the mob again, and this time pointed at the edge of the stage, where a scattering of thin silver rectangles lay.

  “You all must draw her blood. Quickly now!”

  Carrie’s eyes widened as she saw all of the participants in the blood orgy stand, and line up to pick up razors—one each—from the edge of the stage. When an old lady stepped before her and opened a gash on her thigh, Carrie didn’t even scream.

  She was thinking of the baby she didn’t even know she had.

  As another wound opened like fire on her calf and one blade bisected her breast like an acid burn across her nipple, Carrie pictured a tiny face in her mind, sucking on a bottle.

  Carrie cried.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  The door swung open and David pushed Christy behind him. As he did, he smelled the flower scent of her hair, and realized with a pang that this, right now, was probably the last time he would see her. Even if, strictly speaking, he couldn’t really see her. He could smell her though, and she was rich and sweet in the dark. And her side felt smooth and velvety where he held it. In two heartbeats David vowed that he would do anything to protect this smart-ass cop from the murderer he was sure stood before them, and with that he bulled forward like a linebacker.

  He crashed into the man in the doorway with his right shoulder, and the guy went down like a feather, with a whoosh of breath and a feeble cry.

  David hadn’t expected it to be that easy, and he stumbled and fell to the ground outside the room as he recovered. He had thought that their captors would have sent more than one weak guy to collect them. In the faint flickering light of a candle, David crept back to the man who now lay moaning on the ground and holding his side.