“At least tell me how she was, my wife. Rate her for me, compared to the other married women you’ve had. For odd, proud reasons I’m hoping to hear a higher score.”
Tim had startled at the voice, had almost toppled over on haunches nearly numb with fatigue. He’d been right, though. The minister’s voice sounded eight or nine pews away.
“You are not wanted here.”
If the church hadn’t been so deathly still at that moment, Tim would have never heard the voice that seemed to have drifted into his consciousness as though from another conversation, another time.
A much more substantial sound, that of shoe leather against hard, polished floorboards, startled Tim back to more immediate concerns. Tim sucked air noisily just as the footsteps died again.
“I heeeaaaar you.” An uneasy blend of tension and excitement in the minister’s soothing lilt.
Sirens wailed in the near distance.
With the double doors unguarded, what was stopping Tim from duck-walking down the side aisle, slipping out the door and throwing himself out the front door of the church? Sure, he might get hit by flying lead, but it was a sure thing if he stuck around here much longer.
Well, for one thing, his numb legs wouldn’t hold up. He’d stumble and fall and be an easy, pitiful target after just a few hobbling steps.
The soft leather snick, snick sounded again. The footsteps melodramatically slow, the gunman too cautious to be beat by a rushed retreat. Tim had to come up with something else.
Quickly.
He couldn’t look up. His brain kept sending him the paralyzing image of Vincent standing right down the pew from him, smiling as he took careful aim.
He had to do this, had to do it now, but he could barely force his mouth open. His jaws were stiff with such bear-trap tension that he could barely pry them loose. When he spoke, nothing came out. He had to clear his throat first, a bark of a sound that rang off the walls and hard, varnished wood like a gunshot.
“I’ll bet you’d like to know who helped me,” he said, eyes clamped.
The relative strength of his voice shocked him, but if it startled the man with the gun, Vincent didn’t indicate it with detectable movement. Tim winced in expectation of the bite of the bullet. He forced his eyes open and made himself track the sight line along his pew to the center aisle where Vincent Applegate was indeed lining him up for an easy shot.
What the hell. Tim stood, his cramped legs screaming. Then he laughed.
Tim had never told a bigger lie in his bullshit life than he did with that laugh.
Vincent’s gun hand was steady, his arm extended, one eye shut so the other could line Tim up along its blunt black barrel. Tim wondered where that barrel was centered and giddily asked himself if he’d prefer that death shot in the heart or brain.
Neither, he decided. He very much preferred to live.
Chapter Sixty-Two
She was laughing softly, a sound full of kindness and understanding. It brought tearfully to mind their happy early years together before the drinking, the complacency, the Reverend Frost.
“Look at you,” she said gently. “You’re not going to make it, are you?”
His scalp bled from the lamp cut and hurt like a motherfucker, but Laney was referring to the paring knife protruding from his leg.
Matthew had somehow drawn himself upright to face the frightened couple clutching each other in the dining room. He clutched the blade with both hands and tried removing it from the fiery wad of flesh, muscle and tendons locking it in place. The crashing wave of pain and nausea stopped him, made him lean against a wall before he fell.
His feet doing an involuntary shuffle, he looked down to find them sliding in a slick puddle of his own blood.
Laney saw it too, and sadly shook her head. “You’ll never finish your task, hon. You’ve disappointed me so.”
Something boomed like sustained thunder in the distance.
His dead wife flickered and dimmed like a flashlight with old batteries. “It’s all over,” she said. “The police are on their way and they’ll catch you and put you away and eventually strap you onto a gurney, but that won’t be for years and years. In the meantime, they’ll keep you all alone in a small cage until death becomes your final comfort.”
Matthew looked from Laney to the young man and woman on the other end of the room, holding on to each other like lovers.
“Look at them,” Laney said. “You see that terrified look in their eyes. They see a monster. An abomination. Do you see their fear?”
“No,” Matthew choked. He wasn’t like that. He stumbled a step toward them, holding out his hands in peace. They must know him as he really was, a much more complicated man than they’d seen.
“Get back,” the pudgy man barked.
“It’s not my fault. She made me do it,” Matthew cried, pointing out his dead wife with a trembling finger.
He saw no sympathy, only dazed loathing from the bearded man and the attractive woman he held so close.
“Stay away from us.” The woman looked shell-shocked.
Matthew’s glance fell to the ring of bruises on her neck. Had he really been responsible for that? He couldn’t remember why it had seemed so important to hurt her like that. If he could just apologize…
He took a step forward, teetering on legs he could no longer trust, and had to grab a drape for support. It ran red where he gripped it.
Laney shimmered now like a burgundy tongue of fire. He looked to her for the final possibility of comfort. “I have to know. Did I kill you on purpose—or was it an accident?”
She smiled sweetly, a smile he could feel in his mind rather than see in her blurred features. “I know you have to know, deary. I know how important it’s been to you all along. And now you’ll have all of eternity to figure it out, lover.”
He stared at the knife buried in his leg.
“Come on, you can do it,” Laney wheedled.
She was almost gone by then, just a hazy figure which, like a word you repeat endlessly, lost all definition if he stared at it too long. He took hold of the knife handle with two shaky and blood-slimed hands and pulled it out. Like Arthur claiming Excalibur, only it hurt like a motherfucker. It made a sucking sound as the blade popped free, and he watched his blood pouring down his leg and washing over the naked flesh of the knee where his postal uniform shorts ended.
His world went black around the edges as a wooziness that was both more and less than pain started to take him away.
“Perfect.” All that remained of her voice. “Now you know what to do next, don’t you?”
Of course he did. The last sounds he heard were the shocked cries of the nice couple and the gleeful chortles of his own dead wife as he plunged the blade into his throat and prepared to meet his unmerciful eternity.
Chapter Sixty-Three
“I guess you don’t care if I acted alone or not,” Tim said to the man in the center aisle. The man holding the gun. He said it with all of the flippancy he could fake with dry mouth and hammering heart.
The gun lowered a half inch and Vincent’s aiming eye opened. “I already know who helped you. My own so-called loved ones. They’ll answer for it later.”
Tim felt a pinch of relief in realizing that Vincent at least hadn’t wiped out his family—yet. “I’m not talking about them,” he said. “I mean the others.”
Here’s where it got dicey. Madmen, Tim figured, loved conspiracies. It might be possible to keep Vincent interested by teasing him with a little information. Interested enough not to plug him. The downside—and there was plenty of that—was that he’d have to give up on trying to convince the minister of the truth, that he, Tim, was entirely innocent of whatever the hell it was he was being accused of. Second downside, he’d have to come up with something to say that kept Vincent intrigued. Even a master bullshitter like himself might have a problem with that.
The gun wavered. Tim could hear the shrill moan of a breeze in the distance. He tried waiting the gunman out, b
ut it was too unnerving. He said, “It wasn’t just your family who helped me cheat with your wife. Several members of your congregation covered for us too.”
There. He’d said it. Possibly getting the Applegate family and several innocent parishioners killed. But they were words, and he needed words to fill too much dead space.
It didn’t make too much sense, but Tim figured it wouldn’t have to sound rational to a man with paranoid delusions. Vincent was already convinced that the world was out to get him, so this “confession” fit right in.
Vincent absently ran his tongue over his lips, while Tim listened to the howl of the wind as it nearly masked a woman’s rage-filled voice out of nowhere and everywhere.
“Die, you bitch, like I died.”
What? Vincent acted like he hadn’t heard it.
Tim’s thoughts went to Patty for some reason. Something flickered in the corner of his vision, a blur of maroon or burgundy, but he didn’t dare break eye contact with the gunman.
“You’re lying,” Vincent said flatly. “There was no one else in on this.”
Maybe he wasn’t as irrational as he’d seemed. But it was too late for Tim to switch directions. Now he had to proceed as if every word, every gesture was a bomb that might explode in his face.
He shrugged. “Fine. Then shoot me. They win.”
“Get her, you bastard.”
A shout, a scream from somewhere and nowhere and everywhere, but a scream he could barely hear. The wind outside the door, it had become a gathering storm, but Vincent seemed as unaware of it as the semivisible woman’s fury.
Tim took a nonchalant step back, in the direction of the side aisle. Then another. Vincent’s gun waved again.
Tim stopped. He’d gone far enough for now. It would take him another couple steps to reach that aisle and several more before reaching the open double doors to the vestibule. Too far. He had to restrain his urge to run screaming for the exit.
In a light tone that sounded false and unnatural to his ear, he said, “How about that, Vincent? Members of your own church were helping me. Providing alibis, warning when you were nearby, laughing behind your back while I slept with…your wife.”
Almost losing all credibility by forgetting the woman’s name. Or would that have been in his best interest, forcing the armed madman to see his innocence? Probably not.
Tim could almost hear the gunman’s mind working it over as his hands played with the gun. Kill the adulterer now for his taunts, or let him live long enough to reveal his accomplices?
Tim took another step back, and now he was standing in the side aisle. He wondered if he’d actually see the bullet as it came for him.
“I want names.”
A step toward the door. Vincent matched the step so that they still shared a row of pews between them.
“I want names.”
Tim released a pent-up breath. “There are a lot of them,” he said obliquely.
Another tiny step.
Again he heard the woman in the howling gale that had never ended. It rose and fell outside the church. From the altar. From every corner. No words this time from the woman. Only maniacal laughter.
The shot took him by surprise, raising him off his feet. He blinked. Unhurt. Blood-free. His nerves lifting him like that, not the velocity of the round. He found behind him a hole in the wall from the bullet that had entered so quickly it hadn’t cracked the plaster. “No more stalling,” said Vincent. “I want names.”
“There are eight of them,” Tim said, his mind racing to come up with even a single name. “I only know a few of them personally, but they told me they got help from others.”
Vincent stretched his gun arm as though the extra inches would deliver the bullet quicker. “I’m waiting.”
Hell, if he couldn’t even remember his supposed lover’s first name, he’d have a hard time giving up anyone else. Especially with his mind turned to sludge at the expectation of instant death. He churned through names and faces from his one and only church appearance, the memorial service for—
Yes!
“Travis Kendall,” Tim said. “He was the ringleader. In fact, his guilt was the real reason he killed himself. He couldn’t live with the way he’d betrayed you.”
Travis was beyond vengeance, so Tim was hurting no one. And in his paranoid state, Vincent might think it made perfect sense. Still, Tim needed more names.
“Gina Kendall was involved too,” he said. “Not in as big a way, but…“
He hated the thought of Vincent possibly going after the widow after his own murder, but Gina’s was one of the few names he remembered.
He took two more steps.
“LEAVE US ALONE.”
Unlike the previous snatches of barely overheard conversation under the keening windstorm, this was a sonic boom of a voice that filled the air, shuddered the walls. Even Vincent heard it this time. His brow wrinkled. His eyes and gun hand strayed to the high ceiling.
Tim bolted. He hoped that by the time the reverend returned his attention to him, his mad dash up the side aisle to the big double doorway at the back of the chapel would be successful.
He was sure that another shot had been fired when sound ripped through the air, but it was far too loud for even gunfire in a contained space. It was a cacophony of electronic sound amid a burst of train-speed wind howl that should have loosened the church from its foundation, shattered windows, cracked floorboards.
“THIS SHALL NOT HAPPEN.”
It wasn’t a voice. It was a metallic screech that began like a collision of airplanes and ended prematurely, as if the power had been cut as soon as those final words were spoken.
The wind was dying.
At the back of the chapel, still waiting for the bullet to take him off his feet, Tim’s hand found and groped the wall switch, plunging the room into total darkness. Groping blindly before him, he threw himself out those doors and into the vestibule. He only had a second, two or three, to get out, to get on the other side of that big, protective willow and the darkness beyond. Sudden flashes of red and blue dome lights threw erratic patterns of brightness and dark into the vestibule from the broken window. But he deliberately turned away from the safety of that light, the most difficult decision he’d ever made. But the police could only stop Vincent—not the church itself. In time there’d be another minister, another congregation. They’d be back and so would it.
Instead of the front door, he grabbed a doorknob farther down the vestibule wall, twisted it and found himself at the top of a staircase. Down where the bathrooms were. He’d had occasion to visit one on the night of the memorial service, and knew that there was a second set of stairs leading up to another area of the vestibule. Meaning that he couldn’t get trapped down there if Vincent followed.
He took two steps down, and then closed the door nearly shut behind him, leaving just enough of a crack to use the flashes of lighting from the vestibule, which leaked strobe patterns on the dark walls down. He sat on a stair step and peeked into the vestibule. From here, he could also see the swinging kitchen door, the next doorway over. He could slip out the basement door and into the kitchen in seconds. But not as fast as a bullet could reach him.
Where the hell was Vincent?
The small sound from the basement below startled him so that he sucked in air. Jesus, he thought, his limbs heavy with despair, Vincent had sneaked around behind him and now it was all over.
The shots, when they came, were actually a series of sharp slaps, stiletto heels on the concrete floor below.
“Tiiiim,” called out the blonde in a black-lace teddy. She bent a slim finger to hook him, reel him in. “Come down.”
The voice sounded feminine and seductive and hollow. She cocked a bare leg at a provocative angle on a bottom step.
“You’re not mine,” he said flatly. “You’re Griffin’s.”
She ran a hand up her cocked thigh. “I’m yours now, baby.”
Still seated on the stair, he tucked his
legs up high under him, as far from contact with the thing at the bottom of the stairs as possible.
“You won’t come down, baby,” she sang out, “I’ll just have to come up.” She bent forward languidly, resting both hands on a step, putting on display an expanse of mouthwatering cleavage. Her flesh was pale, the contrast against the black lace causing a stir in him where he thought nothing could possibly stir at that moment. She placed a stiletto heel on a stair and began to climb, like a cat.
Mesmerized by her steady advance, Tim had to remind himself that she wasn’t real. She couldn’t touch him. He ripped his gaze from her just in time to see Vincent in his line of vision.
He stood stock-still in the vestibule, an erratic shadow profile backlit by strobe lighting. He looked like a sleepwalker with a forgotten gun at his side, its blunt barrel pointed at the floor. His head turned slowly to take in the array of doors before him.
Tim pulled back into deeper shadows, hoping he hadn’t been seen in the inch or so of vertical crack where the door nearly met its jamb.
Thudding footsteps. Both men turned their attention to the front of the building. Tim had to nudge his door slightly to risk a partial view. He saw the knob turning slowly and the door at the church entrance creaking open.
“Get away,” Tim ordered as Melinda Dillon cautiously entered.
The sight of her standing there, like some tiny, hot cop with her hair hanging loose, stance open and arms outstretched and wrapped around a small gun, well, it did things to Tim.
He’d given himself away with the ignored warning, and now the madman had two targets from which to choose. The breath hissed from Tim like escaping steam from an old radiator as he compelled his body to take action, to do something.
When the cold hand clamped tightly around his ankle, he kicked out with a sharp cry. Griffin’s blonde phantom had hold of him with two very real, very cold hands. Tim watched, too horrified to react, as the demon’s skin rippled. Its mouth convulsed and words escaped it.
“THIS SHALL NOT HAPPEN.”
There was nothing human about it, the voice a collision of industrial sounds that boomed through the church, crashed off the walls. With all he had left, Tim yanked his foot from the thing’s dead grasp and scooted up and out. He crashed through the door and took three steps across the darkened vestibule, three charging steps to the kitchen’s swinging door, his only conscious thought—the fire exit had better be unlocked.
Malevolent Page 27
