The Edge of Ruin

by Melinda Snodgrass

  “No. They told me I don’t have to. You’ve done your thing. Now it’s my turn. I’m more important than you.” He started back into the house.

  Rhiana ran after him and closed her hand on his shoulder. He winced as her nails dug through the material of his shirt and into his skin. “Who told you that? Who said that?”

  The smile was pure poison. “Your dad.”

  He broke free and continued into the house. Rhiana ran after him. “He didn’t. You’re lying.”

  The narrow shoulder rose and fell in a dismissive shrug. “Think what you want.”

  They were down the hall and into the master bedroom. Grenier’s taste had run to the Baroque. There was a huge four-poster bed with heavily carved dark wood, and thick chocolate brown velvet curtains. A matching armoire and mirrored dresser stood on opposite walls. The dresser mirror was occluded from the touch of the Old Ones. As soon as they were through the door a girl began whimpering, small animal sounds of pure terror.

  Andresson went to the dresser and got a large .357 Magnum. He checked the ammo and headed back for the door. “Oh, and don’t worry about your little boyfriend seeing anything, or knowing that you gave her to me. I’ll stop him way before he gets to the house.”

  “No!” Rhiana yelled. “You’ve got to help me get her out of here.”

  “You’re the one who wanted her here. You deal with it. She’s in the tub,” he said indifferently and left.

  “Please, lady. Help me.”

  Rhiana glanced over at the bed. The girl was naked and tied spread-eagle to the posts. Sweat-matted and tangled red hair lay across the pillow like a flame. Her small breasts were bruised, and in places teeth marks were edged in blood. Her thighs were smeared with blood and sperm. The room smelled of pee, and there was a dark stain on the sheets beneath her.

  Rhiana ignored her, and moved hesitantly to the door that led into the opulent bathroom. The smells in the room, sperm, blood, sweat, booze, and sewage, caught in the back of her throat like claws.

  The horror in the bathtub set her stomach to heaving. That and sheer panic over what Richard would do. The physical confines of her body seemed to blow apart as she fled wildly from the world.

  Her last conscious thought was, I’ll tell him I didn’t know.

  * * *

  The tunnel ended at a cinder-block wall. Moisture had wept across the concrete, leaving Rorschach patterns in the gray matrix. A metal ladder was bolted into the blocks. They formed a milling herd at the base of the ladder. Weber put a hand and a foot on the ladder, only to be stopped by Jay saying, “No offense, Pops, but how about sending someone younger and more agile?”

  “How about I bust your face?” Sam suggested sweetly.

  “Sam,” Syd said. “Save the ’tude for the bad guys.”

  Pamela watched the waffled soles of Jay’s hiking boots disappearing into the darkness. The ladder shook under the man’s weight. She didn’t like climbing, ever since that fall out of the apple tree in the backyard that broke her arm, and this ladder looked rickety.

  Sam shrugged. “Okay, I’m cool with letting Jay be a monster magnet.”

  Pamela noticed that the rattle of the iron ladder against the concrete lost its rhythm for an instant at Sam’s words.

  Pamela glanced around the circle of faces. Estevan’s eyes had a ring of white all around the iris, and his pupils were wide. She stepped over to him and gave his hand a squeeze. The skin of his palm was clammy with sweat.

  There was the sound of grunting from over their heads. Jay’s voice drifted down. “It’s not opening. Hope it’s not locked.”

  “Shouldn’t be,” Joseph called up. “Grenier said it wasn’t, but that it hasn’t been opened in a long time.”

  “You need some more muscle?” Weber called up.

  “Not enough room,” Jay’s voice floated down.

  “Probably enough room for me,” said Sam, and she went eeling up the ladder.

  There were more sounds of effort, then a loud clang as the trapdoor flew up. Light poured through the opening, and Jay scrabbled for purchase. The unexpected lack of resistance had taken him by surprise, and he lost his footing. Sam clutched at him, caught him by the shirt, but she couldn’t hold him. He came half sliding, half falling down the ladder. His ankle buckled as he landed wrong. A string of profanity erupted. Franklin jumped past him and climbed rapidly up the ladder.

  One by one they made their way out of the tunnel. As Pamela climbed, her mind kept stupidly repeating, once out of the well our heroes …, once out of the well our heroes … But she could never figure out what the heroes did, and then she was through the trapdoor and standing in the basement.

  Franklin leaned against a tall wine rack. He had an arrow nocked, the bowstring pulled, but not quite to the ready, but they heard nothing and saw no one. There were six rows of eight-foot-tall wine racks, but most of the racks were empty.

  The stairs from the basement brought them into a walk-in pantry. There was very little left on the shelves. A bag of sugar had toppled and torn, making the tile floor both gritty and sticky. Pamela suddenly realized that sweat was beading beneath her bangs, and it wasn’t just from nerves. Now that they were no longer below ground, it was incredibly warm for February in Virginia.

  Pamela hung back while the law enforcement types used their training to check the kitchen. After a few seconds they waved her in. The stink from rotting food left lying on dirty plates was stomach churning. A few fat flies buzzed lazily over the moldy scraps. Overlaying the cloying sweet stench of decay was a throat-burning chemical odor. Mold, like soft green velvet, draped itself over the food scraps on the plates.

  “Weird,” Estevan whispered. “Who’s ever heard of flies in the winter?”

  They moved on, using door frames for cover and leapfrogging each other. Pamela could see their discomfort at holding nightsticks and knives instead of guns. The dining room was empty. There were faded places on the walls where art had once hung. The seeded glass doors of the buffet hung open, and one creaked as the hot biting wind found its twisting way into this interior room. There was no sound beyond the monotonous creak, creak, creak and the sigh of the wind.

  “I gotta pee,” Estevan said, and his whisper seemed horribly loud.

  “Tie a knot in it,” Rudi advised.

  Apparently they had been louder than they realized, because suddenly a girl began screaming. “Help! Help! Please, somebody, help me!” Sobs punctuated the words.

  Weber took off running down the hall, away from the public rooms, back toward what Grenier had said was his private living quarters. Weber was only a half second faster than the rest of them.

  “Cops! Always playing the hero,” Pamela muttered as she ran after them.

  The screams emanated from behind the heavily carved door. By the time Pamela got there, Jay and Rudi were pulling security in the hall, and the other men and Sam were inside the room. Pamela stepped over the threshold. There was a girl tied spread-eagle to the heavily carved wood pillars of his four-poster bed. The room was awash with the sour smell of unwashed bodies, the cloying scent of sperm, and the sharp reek of spilled liquor.

  Pamela noted the blood smearing the girl’s thighs, and the fact she was a true redhead. She would have been pretty had her face not been splotched with bruises and puffy from crying. Mucus smeared her upper lip. Her face and body carried a layer of baby fat. Pamela guessed her age at fourteen or fifteen.

  Weber cut at the ropes securing her wrists. Judging from the swollen red skin around the cords, and her puffy purple fingers, she had been there for a long time. Sam was muttering a running string of curses. Pamela pulled off her jacket and laid it over the girl, shielding her from the men. Sam looked startled and then chagrined.

  “Hush. Hush. You’re going to be all right now. What’s your name, honey?” Pamela kept her voice low and soft, the tone you used to soothe a frightened horse. The girl’s sobs died to whimpers as Pamela put her arms around her.

  “Jessie.”<
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  “Jessie, is there another woman here? Older than you.”

  “The black woman,” the girl said, and her voice shook. “She fought him. He hurt her. Bad. She screamed and screamed. For a long time.” Pamela tightened her grip as the shivering became massive shudders that threatened to pull the girl out of her arms.

  “Do you know where she is?” Weber said, and the girl shrank away with a cry. Sam pushed past him and repeated the question.

  “In … in the bathroom.”

  “Angie! Angie!” Weber yelled and ran through the bathroom door. Then there was silence—for a long, long time.

  Everyone moved to the bathroom except Pamela, who kept holding Jessie. There was a cry of disgust from Estevan. He burst back into the bedroom. Joseph had his arm around the young man, who was crying and gagging.

  Dread closed in on her. “What?” Pamela whispered.

  “Angela’s dead,” Joseph said. “You don’t want to know more than that.”

  The other members of the team returned to the bedroom. Weber’s skin was gray, and the effort not to weep gouged lines in his forehead and around his eyes.

  Franklin took charge. “We need to get Jessie out of here.”

  “She can’t go alone, and we can’t spare anyone to take her,” Jay argued.

  “No, we can spare someone. We probably shouldn’t, but we can,” came the agent’s response.

  Joseph stepped into the huddle. “Send Estevan. He’s just a kid, and he’s terrified.”

  “What about Angela?” Weber asked thickly.

  “We save the living,” Syd said to him softly. “You know that. If we can, once Richard gets here, we’ll take Angela home, too, but right now Jessie’s got to be our first priority.”

  It was quickly arranged. At the kitchen they separated. Estevan, supporting the girl in the circle of an arm, headed off toward the stairs to the basement. The rest of them went down the hall and through the door that separated the private living quarters from the public rooms. In the living room, there were more dirty dishes piled on end tables and the coffee table. Stuffing exploded like dandelion fluff through the ripped and stained blue velvet upholstery on the couches and chairs. The white carpet looked like an experimental painting. Pamela had a feeling that some of the stains were blood, but she didn’t want to ask.

  She also didn’t want to ask Sam what she had seen in that bathroom. She didn’t want to know what had been done to Angela. But the not knowing and wondering pricked at her mind, trying to drive her to ask. She pushed the impulse aside.

  The backpacks were unlimbered, and they pulled out the gasoline-filled canteens, and began dousing the furniture cushions and the carpet.

  “Why haven’t we met anyone?” Joseph asked the room.

  “I think everyone’s off planning a reception for us on the main road or at the dell,” Weber said. “I think those birds were carrying a message. Kenntnis said the things around us could be used against us.”

  Jay spun, looking at the walls as if expecting them to collapse on top of him. “If it’s a trap, shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”

  “And how do we tell Richard we’re bookin’ out on him?” Sam asked.

  Syd spoke up. “No, we gotta stick.”

  Joseph and Rudi exchanged glances. Rudi nodded, and Joseph said, “We’re not leaving.”

  Jay looked to Franklin, who shook his head. For a long moment Jay struggled with himself. The syncopated ticks from old-fashioned spring-wound watches seemed deafening in the silence.

  “Well, we better get these cushions against the walls,” Jay said. Sam gave him an approving smile and slapped him hard on the shoulder.

  They hurried about, propping the split cushions against the wood walls. Next they splashed gasoline across them, and finally the cigarettes were carefully tucked into the rents in the cushions. Pamela noticed that the cigarettes were no longer burning. She wondered what it was about fire, light, and Old Ones.

  “Now what?” Jay asked.

  Weber checked his watch. “We wait another five minutes, and then some of us hold down the fort, and the rest of us go toward the gate and raise some hell so Eddie can get a look at this glass thingie.”

  FORTY-SIX

  RICHARD

  There was a ragged sound to the bike’s engine that I didn’t like, but I could understand. The air was horribly dry, and tainted with stinks that bit at the back of my throat and had my eyes watering.

  We were moving so fast that both tires left the ground as we crested a small hill. Eddie gasped and giggled, but for me the euphoria was gone. Only the skeletons of dead trees and one final hill separated the gate from us. We were two guys on a motorbike, and arrayed against us were monsters—

  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. And people, I added as I spotted the two men hiding in the trees.

  One jumped out directly in front of us. I had a split second to decide what to do. It was too close quarters to use the sword, I didn’t have time to dodge him, and if I hit him straight on the bike would go down, and then his buddy would have us.

  I wrenched the handlebars hard to the left and hit the brake. The front tire locked, and I felt the muscles in my shoulders and neck spasm as I braced against the hard jerk. I then let the back tire fishtail, spinning us 180 degrees. Eddie’s scream was a high-pitched whistle of terror directly into my ear. The back of the bike slammed into the man and knocked him flat. The second man started running toward us as I fought for control of the bike. We were wobbling, but I gunned the engine anyway, and drove straight at him.

  At the last minute I pulled to the right and stabbed hard and fast, catching the man in the chest. There was a moment of breath-stopping terror when our momentum sent us hurtling past while the blade was caught in his ribs. I almost lost my grip, but the sword wrenched loose before the hilt slipped out of my sweat-slicked hand. It still pulled the hell out of my fingers where they twined through the hilt.

  As we clawed our way up the final hill, I realized that other than that sentry creature, we hadn’t met anything but humans. I glanced down the length of the glittering blade. The Old Ones fear it. The barest touch and they die. Kenntnis’s voice rumbled in memory.

  They were afraid to come too close. They were letting humans face me and get hurt. Die, my innate honesty forced me to acknowledge. There was a sharp pain at the hinge of my jaw as I gritted my teeth. I wanted something to die other than my own kind. I wanted to kill the creatures that had brought us to this.

  We crested the final hill, and suddenly my thoughts about killing monsters seemed like a bully’s bravado. A hot, life-sucking wind swirled in the dell, kicking up errant dust devils that filled the air with a choking grit. It stung the exposed skin on my face and hands. The gate filled the entire cliff face. Mist, like steam from quiescent geysers, trailed from the various glass sculptures that dotted the ground in front of it. Kenntnis’s glass tomb was centered among the other sculptures.

  “Holy crap,” Eddie said, and he was looking off to the side of the gate where another, much smaller opening in the gray stones showed space and that burning star. “Why isn’t our atmosphere getting sucked away?”

  And now I had another gut-burning problem. If Rhiana’s magic failed, it was most definitely game over. I had to close at least that opening between the multiverses.

  But between me and that tear in reality were humans. And others. They were just disturbing shapes that my mind failed to grasp, but they were utterly terrifying. I felt the rim of Eddie’s helmet digging into my shoulder as the young scientist pressed closer to me. I wished I had somebody to hide behind.

  The desire to turn the bike and flee back the way we had come was so strong that my arms were shivering. There had to be somebody else who could deal with this shit. But Pamela and Weber and Angela were here.

  I had to be here, too.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  There had been a sharp but short argument about everybody staying at the house as Richard had instru
cted, or some of them going out to meet Richard and help him get back to the house. Weber and the “help Richard” cadre had won. So they left Jay and Bob at the house to hold the retreat. As best Pamela could follow the discussion, it seemed they thought the bow gave Bob the best chance to keep the crazies at bay.

  Weber had been to Grenier’s compound before, so he led the way. A policeman’s nightstick swung in his hand. Rudi, big and powerful and armed with a nightstick and a knife, brought up the rear. Syd had a nightstick and a knife, Sam had a knife in each hand, and Joseph had brass knuckles armoring each hand. They had Pamela tucked in the middle again. She realized they thought she was helpless and useless, and she suddenly resented it. Pamela stole another glance at Sam, looking like a pirate, and decided if she ever got out of here she was going to have somebody teach her how to fight.

  A strong, hot, harsh wind was blowing against them. Pamela assumed it was flowing through the gate. I’m breathing the air of an alien universe, she thought.

  It was hard going, and Pamela wondered how Richard was going to stay upright on the bike. A dark red sand that glittered with mica flakes pushed across the ground like the final eddy of a wave flinging itself high up the beach. But unlike the wave, the sand never retreated. It insinuated itself between the ground and the soles of their boots, making them slip and stumble, and worked its way around the laces until their socks were thick with sweat and grit.

  “Okay, don’t go near the sculptures,” Weber said. “Rhiana came out of one of them, so they may be entryways.”

  “And don’t walk under anything,” Syd said, and he shuddered.

  “Basically, don’t expect the world to remain normal,” Weber concluded.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Pamela asked, and felt suddenly both daring and guilty at the profanity.

  “Whatever you can imagine probably won’t be strange enough,” Weber said.

  “Greeaaat,” breathed Rudi.

  Weber’s head jerked up, and then Pamela heard it, too. It was faint and distant like the buzz of a solitary bee. It was the sound of an engine approaching. They picked up the pace, and soon broke free of the dying trees.