by Harvey Click
“Let’s not think about it.”
Sarah frowned some more and sipped her wine.
“Just because nobody’s been killed for a few days doesn’t mean it’s all over,” she said.
Ben ate his asparagus without speaking. He had a bad feeling that they were going to be driving to Mount Vernon tomorrow.
Chapter Forty-Two
Angel lay in bed unable to lift her head. Whenever she tried to move it, the bedroom whirled like a carnival ride. Last night she had received her final three treatments.
There was a deep poison-filled incision above each lung, making each breath ache and rattle as she struggled against suffocation. But the worst incision was the big X that Baby had carved above her heart, and she could feel that organ fluttering weakly in her chest like a trapped bird.
She smelled her own sepsis, smelled her flesh rotting beneath the bandages. She kept shutting her eyes, wanting to sleep, but having nothing to focus on made her even dizzier, so she forced them back open and stared at the ceiling chandelier.
Baby was standing at one of the bedroom windows, staring out, watching. Sometimes he did that for hours on end. His anxiety made her feel worse, and she tried to ignore it, tried to ignore everything but the chandelier.
Someone entered the room, and the room spun as she turned her eyes to see. It was Kathy Beers, the farmer’s wife. Whenever she had no direct orders to occupy her, she wandered from room to room like a wraith haunting the house. Her pale freckled skin, her spectral hair, her empty blue eyes, and the white nightgown she always wore made her look all the more like a ghost.
Angel turned her eyes away. She hated the ghost and wished that Baby would kill her.
Instead, he turned from the window and led Kathy to Angel’s bed. The ghostly weight caused the room to tilt and sway. From the corner of her eye, she saw Baby undressing, carefully folding his trousers, laying them on the chair and unbuttoning his shirt. She thought he was undressing so slowly and deliberately to torment her with his striptease.
It wasn’t the first time he’d had sex with Kathy beside Angel in her own bed, soaked with the stench of her illness. At first it had shocked her, even through the muffling layers of nausea, but now she told herself that it was his way of symbolically making love with her, using this pale zombie as a surrogate beside the sick body of his fiancée.
Still, she looked away as Baby climbed into bed and pressed his naked body against the ghost. The whole room seemed to rock and gyrate with the bed. Vertigo brought vomit to Angel’s throat, but she kept swallowing it, not daring to ruin Baby’s lovemaking with her illness. The swaying room, the glittering chandelier, the sounds of intercourse all seemed even more hallucinatory than the visions she had experienced as a child in the box.
She knew the sense of delusion wasn’t caused entirely by her illness. It came from Baby’s presence, his sorcery leaking into the air around him. Where Baby walked, a trail of hallucinations followed in his wake, as if he warped the texture of reality around him.
She knew his powers were evil, but what kinship did she have with virtue? Born of iniquity in a box of depravity and nursed on insanity, she had no objection to his evil so long as the two of them shared it together.
Kathy’s ghostly moaning reminded Angel of her own anatomical inadequacy. When her illness was over and she and Baby were married, could his sorcery give her what other women were given at birth? Of course there were sex-change clinics, and while she listened to the bedsprings squeaking, she imagined having the most beautiful vagina to offer him, labia like pink petals of a flower, genitalia so alluring that they would thrill him for centuries while they walked the world together.
Her fantasy was interrupted by the sound of someone entering the room. Angel turned her eyes painfully. It was Matthew Hamelin, glaring at the three of them. She knew what thoughts were swimming through his damaged brain: he was furious that Baby was in bed with both women.
Such a feeble, absurd little man, pale and weak like her brother Darnell. But unlike Darnell, who had been sweetly innocent, the frail poet was constantly seething with hostility.
Baby stopped his lovemaking and stared at him. “You’re jealous, are you?” he said.
Hamelin shrank back but didn’t leave the room. Angel could almost hear the two halves of his brain warring: one side terrified, one side vengeful.
“Well then, take off your clothes,” Baby said. “Join the fun.”
The poet stiffened, obviously sensing a trick. He tried to back out of the room but couldn’t. Not possible to disobey the lord and master. He unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it out of his trousers and took it off, revealing a narrow, hairless chest. He removed his shoes and tried to undo his pants, but his fingers began to convulse, jerking up and down on the zipper like a TV picture gone bad.
“Control your excitement,” Baby said. “Open your fly and show us what you’ve got.”
The pants came off and the socks, and Hamelin stood there trembling in a pair of stained cotton briefs.
“Take those panties off too,” Baby said.
Hamelin’s white face reddened as he pulled them down. Angel felt almost sorry for him, pathetically naked, a frail white shivering twig revealing his laughable inadequacy to his mistress.
“Now take off the rest of your clothes,” Stonebrenner said.
The poet looked down at himself, confused—there was nothing else to take off.
“Come here,” Baby said, “I’ll help you.”
His face blazing with hostility and terror, Hamelin stepped shakily to the side of the bed. Baby got the scalpel off the night table and used it to cut the outlines of a shirtfront on the poet’s naked chest. He cut a V-shaped incision beneath his neck, and from the bottom of the V he cut a bloody red seam straight down the chest where the buttons would go, and then cut another seam around his abdomen.
“Now, open up your shirt,” he said.
Bitterness and fear consumed the poet’s face, but he worked his fingertips into the long incision from neck to belly button and began pulling the cut pelt away from his flesh.
Angel watched from the corner of her eye, thinking that this must be part of her delirium. It had to be. Surely no one could do what the poet was doing, peeling the skin of his chest open like a shirt and baring the bloody meat beneath it. It wasn’t possible.
She shut her eyes and looked at the spinning darkness instead.
Chapter Forty-Three
Saturday started out well enough. Ed Hardin bought them lunch and then took them to a shooting range near Mount Vernon. They all took turns firing his new Anschutz .22 caliber rifle, which looked very fancy and expensive though Ben was able to outshoot it, or at least outshoot Ed, with his inexpensive Savage .22 bolt action.
Ben had brought his customized Springfield 1911, so for the first time Sarah tried shooting a .45 caliber pistol. She had brought her Ruger along, and Ed made a fuss over it as if were a Rolls Royce.
They all tried their hand with Ed’s Hammerli target .22 pistol, and both men were impressed with her skill. Though Ben’s groups were much tighter than hers, sometimes just one ragged hole in the center of the target, she found she could shoot nearly as well as Ed. His age showed; his hands trembled a little when he aimed.
For a couple of hours Ed drove them around to show them the beautiful old campus of Kenyon College a few miles outside of Mount Vernon and the pleasant rolling Amish farmland beyond it. They returned to his house in the late afternoon, and Ed showed them his wine cellar and selected several bottles for them to enjoy before, during, and after dinner. Then he showed them the new reloading equipment he had added to his basement workshop. He opened box after box of custom target ammo he had loaded, holding up the brass cartridges for their inspection as if they were jewels.
Sarah began to wish that she and Ben weren’t spending the night; an elderly man’s hobbies can grow old pretty quickly. His cooking, at least, was one hobby that she could appreciate. He served sautéed veal scal
lops with mushrooms, Amish noodles, sautéed eggplant, and a delicate chocolate mousse for dessert. After dinner he opened yet another bottle of wine and led them to his front living room.
“Okay, I’ll lay out my evidence,” he said, “and you, the jury, can decide if I’m insane or not. Sarah, as Ben can tell you, for many years I’ve been threatening to write a book about the most sinister sorcerers of the last 100 years. I’ll probably never get around to writing it, but I’ve done a good deal of research. Probably the most sinister of them all is a shadowy figure named Elden Becker.
“Becker lived in Boston in the 40s and 50s, and there are many ghastly rumors surrounding him, lurid tales of hypnotized women used as sex slaves and later found floating in the river or wandering through the streets in a state of lunacy. People he came in contact with had a tendency to disappear permanently, and others ended up in mental institutions in a zombie-like state.
“Unlike Aleister Crowley and some of the other well-known hocus-pocusers, Elden Becker shunned publicity. It seems not many photographs of him exist, and I’ve only been able to dig up two. Here’s one of them.”
Ed had piled enough books, clippings, and scrapbooks on his coffee table to keep them entertained for a week or more, and he dug through one of the piles and produced a page from a 1939 copy of the The Baltimore Sun. A headline read, “Elden Becker questioned about disappearance of heiress,” and above it was a photograph of a broad-shouldered bald man trying unsuccessfully to cover the camera lens with his large hand.
“So what?” Ben said.
“So a couple days ago I discovered something pretty remarkable,” Ed said. “Isaac Stonebrenner had already disappeared from Mount Vernon by the time I moved here, so I’ve never seen him. But when I started looking into all this stuff that’s been happening, I asked around for a photograph of him, and here’s what I found.”
He pulled a glossy color snapshot from one of his stacks. “This was taken right here in town in 1972, not long before Stonebrenner disappeared.”
The man in the photo, walking past the Mount Vernon courthouse and looking toward the street with a wary expression as if sensing a camera nearby, certainly looked like the man in the newspaper photo, and not a day older.
“Okay, so two men in a world of billions look alike,” Ben said.
“Apparently three,” Ed said. “That is, if you want to believe that Isaac and Jacob Stonebrenner aren’t the same person. I showed this 1972 picture to the lawyer McClosky, and he swears this is the same man who was in his office a few days ago. He’s lost some weight, McClosky said, and he looks really sick and horrible, but it’s the same man!”
Ed pulled a small battered black-and-white photo from one of his scrapbooks. “Here’s my only other picture of Elden Becker,” he said. “If you look closely at the picture of Stonebrenner you can see a little triangular spot on the right side of his forehead, like a birthmark or something. Now look at this picture—the mark is very tiny, but you can see it.”
“It’s probably just a spot on the print,” Ben said.
“Elden Becker disappeared from Boston in 1962, the same year that Isaac Stonebrenner showed up in Mount Vernon.”
“Maybe so, but they’re not the same person,” Ben said. “That newspaper picture is from 1939. So how old would Becker be today?”
“Well, this is the part that I didn’t want to tell you over the phone,” Ed said. “I’ll just show you the evidence and let you decide. I started digging through my collection of books on the occult, and here’s what I came up with.”
He picked up an old book from the stack on the coffee table, opened it to a bookmark, and handed it to Ben.
Ben glanced at it and said, “My Latin’s about good enough to read an old Roman stop sign.”
“Okay then, here’s one in English.”
Ed found another book, opened it to a bookmark, and began reading out loud something about an alchemist treatment that could allow a person to live for centuries.
“Ed, this is ridiculous,” Ben said.
But Ed wouldn’t shut up. He droned on and on, reciting more passages about magicians and Longevitals from his dusty old books and then playing tape recordings of stories he had collected about the Dietrick house and the Stonebrenner mansion.
Sarah wasn’t sure what she had hoped to learn from Ed’s folklore, but this wasn’t it. The wine was good, but old and complex and heavy in her mouth, and really she would have preferred a beer or a Coke. Two antique pendulum clocks ticked on the walls while a big grandfather clock ticked in the corner of the next room, and Ed, with his white beard, began to remind her of Father Time.
She tried not to yawn, but it was difficult. When her eyelids grew too heavy, she got up and strolled around the big room, looking at his paintings and the two glass display cases full of curios.
“What’s all this supposed to add up to anyway?” Ben asked.
“You tell me,” Ed said. “A man who doesn’t age. Wherever he goes, the people he comes in contact with either disappear or are found wandering around like zombies. He lived next door to the Dietrick house, and that house and every other house on the road churned out enough ghost stories that I couldn’t collect them all if I tried. He disappears for 40 years, leaving a bizarre legal arrangement that suggests he plans to return. A child unfortunate enough to live near his house grows up to be a psychotic killer. An unmarked grave is robbed on the Stonebrenner property, and a few days later Stonebrenner himself shows up at McClosky’s office and reclaims his property. You tell me.”
Ben grimaced. “Come on, Ed, you don’t really expect us to believe that Stonebrenner came out of that grave?”
“You can believe whatever you want, I’m just showing you the evidence. Maybe it doesn’t tell you anything, but it tells me that Stonebrenner is a Longevital. Furthermore, he’s a magus, a sorcerer, a warlock, the kind of person they used to hang in Salem. Maybe they knew what they were doing.”
“You’ve been collecting these spook stories too long,” Ben said. “You need to find a different hobby.”
“Okay, fine, I won’t say another word. But let me ask you one thing. When you two visited the Dietrick house, what did you see? Was that just another stupid spook story?”
Ben didn’t answer. Sarah started to say something but stopped. She didn’t want to revisit the Dietrick house right now, even in conversation.
“Well, that’s my sermon for tonight,” Ed said. “Want some more wine, Sarah?”
“No thanks. I’m getting pretty sleepy.”
“So am I,” Ed said. “You two want separate rooms or will one be enough?”
“One,” Ben said.
It was the first sensible word Sarah had heard all night.
Chapter Forty-Four
It was the X-shaped incision that almost killed her. Angel seemed to hover above her body. She could see it lying beneath her in the bed, white and wasted, naked except for the bandages covering its wounds, one bandage for her liver, one for each lung, and one for the big X that Baby had carved above her heart. The other three wounds were on her back, two for her kidneys and one for her pancreas.
They were seven swords of pain plunged deep into her body. If she let go of the swords she believed she could float away, painless and free. The emaciated body languishing beneath her already looked dead, waiting only for her to let go so it could give up this miserable battle against the poisons oozing through its veins. She could feel its heart flutter and stop, flutter and stop, a palsied fist too weak to clench. Only love forced her to hold on, but even her love fluttered and wanted to stop.
She tried to tell herself stories of what she and Baby would do when this ordeal was over, the places they would go with all the time in the world to see them, the secrets he would teach her, the ways they would love each other for centuries to come, as no other lovers ever had.
But she was too sick to believe in anything, even in Stonebrenner. If he loved her, how could he put her through this agony? Surely
his intent was to kill her, as slowly and sadistically as possible.
Flutter and stop, flutter and stop, the pale body beneath her with its seven stigmata looking dead already, a shrunken cadaver. Flutter and stop.
And then there was a new trouble. With Angel nearly absent from her own body, floating above it like a ghost, she felt something else trying to move in, trying to take over.
It was Darnell, squirming and wrestling, fighting for control.
***
Ben and Sarah made love quietly, not wanting to be overheard by Ed, whose room was across the hall from theirs, and Sarah found the slow stillness exciting, Ben’s body moving like warm waves over her tingling nakedness, his hands lapping softly at her breasts, his lips teasing hers like ripples of salt water. She reached orgasm twice, and each time she wanted to cry out; but containing the cry, clutching it inside her as an ecstatic secret, made it even more intense. None of her other lovers had ever felt so good.
When they finished, she could see the sounds that Ben had wanted to make written on his face. She laughed quietly and held him against her.
He murmured sleepily and curled up against her, his hand still cupping one of her breasts. Sarah heard his breathing slow into slumber, felt his hand loosen and slip away, but still she lay awake, staring at the dark ceiling and thinking she should try to make sense of Ed’s strange stories, but her mind kept wandering off to think of Ben instead.
She thought of the horses they had rented Thursday. She hadn’t been on a horse since childhood, and she hadn’t enjoyed a better day since she was a child. It seemed impossible that such happiness could come in the midst of such trouble. Finally she closed her eyes and drifted, imagining the sound of hooves, Ben’s horse clopping alongside hers through curvy forest trails above lush valleys.
She heard a voice beside her. “Sarah. It’s me. Darnell.”
