“Stop, goddamn you!” Colbert shouted, pulling a .38 revolver from beneath his jacket as he crossed the floor and raised his weapon, Pitch leering down at the advancing foreman, who made his way to the slab—the gun now pointing directly at Pitch. “Let that child go, you son of a bitch!”
Pitch laid the knife on the child’s stomach, and stepped around to the front of the altar, smiling as Colbert glanced over his shoulder at Arleta Briscomb, who hissed and bared her teeth while her idiot son flipped him the bird.
Pitch, arms held out, palms up, thumbs pointed outward, wriggled his fingers, and cried out, “Azezel and Belial!”
Colbert looked up at the crazed madman, and cocked the hammer back.
“Belial and Moloch!” Pitch shrieked, and Colbert’s hand began to tremble.
Pitch raised his hands high above his head, glaring at Colbert, his red eyes bulging and flashing as he screamed into the pitch-black void, “AZEZEL, MOLOCH AND BELIALLLL!”
Colbert’s hand shook, his entire arm beginning to tremble as Teddy’s eyes grew wide, and Pitch grinned, lowering his arms and pointing at the stunned mine Forman, whose suddenly palsied right hand began to turn, until the gun, pointing at his belly now, slowly began rising to his face. He grabbed his wrist but the barrel kept coming… higher… higher still, tears streaming down his face, over his cheeks as the blue steel tip of the gun slipped slowly into his mouth, and Pitch, forming a gun with his thumb and index finger, pointed his imaginary weapon at the frightened mine foreman. He cocked the thumb forward and Colbert pulled the trigger, Evie Miller fainting as a deafening roar of fire exploded from the barrel, buckling Colbert’s legs as his head jolted back and his face distorted, an eye popped loose from its socket and blood, bone and bits of brain matter sprayed from the back of his skull.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jason opened his eyes, squinting against the harsh light of the kitchen. With every heartbeat, a big bass drum rattled his skull. The cold hardwood floor pressing against his belly peeled away from his skin as he rolled over to see a cockroach skittering across the floor, twitching its antennae as if regarding the huge smorgasbord of meat that lay before him, and then scurrying away when the wounded man sat up. Jason shivered, and goose-bumps crawled up his forearms. It was cold and drafty, as if the window had been left open. But it was not open, and neither was the back door.
He looked up at the clock. It was one o’clock in the morning.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered, and then got to his knees, and struggled up to his feet.
Supporting himself with a chair, he touched the back of his head and winced.
He’d been sitting at the kitchen table, taunting Missy, really giving it to that little bitch, when… what?
What the hell happened?
One minute he’d been munching on a chicken leg, his subservient wife standing behind him, washing dishes. The next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, staring at a cockroach.
Standing behind him!
Jason turned to see the skillet sitting on the counter. “Oh, you bitch!” he shouted. “You stupid fucking bitch!”
He stomped out of the kitchen, into the living room, where he scooped his pants off the floor and put them on, and saw the front door standing wide open.
“Missy!” he yelled, searing waves of pain rippling through his skull as he charged up the stairs, two at a time, and made his way into the bedroom, where his wife’s bloodstained robe lay on the floor. Her purse was gone. Her shoes, usually kept at the foot of the bed, were gone, too. He closed his eyes and heard Missy screaming, “I’ll leave!”
“You stupid bitch,” he muttered on his way to the closet, where he picked out a clean white shirt, slipped it on and buttoned it. Stuffing the shirttails into his pants, he walked over to the dresser and opened a drawer, and then rummaged around until he found an unopened pint of Wild Turkey. He touched his head and felt the lump, tried turning to examine it in the mirror, but it was too far back on his head. Jason twisted off the plastic cap and guzzled a mouthful of whiskey, and then stood there, waiting for the familiar burn to blaze a path to his stomach. When it hit, he sighed and took another drink, waiting for the warmth, that when it came, spread from his stomach to his chest, into his arms and down his legs.
It felt great.
Standing in front of the dresser, seething with hate, Jason thought about his wife. Missy belonged to him. He had bought her, pure and simple. She was his as much as the car in the driveway or the shoes on his feet. And what was his stayed his.
“I’ll leave!”
He screwed the cap back onto the bottle and glared into the mirror.
“I’ll leave!”
Eyes glazing over, he slipped the whiskey into his front pocket and gritted his teeth, a cruel smile spreading across his face.
“You ever leave me, I’ll kill you.”
Jason turned and left the room, and went down the hallway to check on those two miserable fucking brats.
* * *
Missy Thomas ambled up Seeker’s Mountain like a shell-shocked soldier: feet stamping up and down, marching—much like Robert Harrison had marched through Grand Central Station shortly before hurling himself into the path of a speeding locomotive. Moonlight revealed her disheveled hair, the dried blood on her forehead and the vacant, faraway look in her eyes. The attack had been brutal, but she didn’t feel the bruises on and inside her body, or the gash in her scalp. The cold wind blowing across the mountain didn’t faze her. All she cared about was getting to Weaver’s Creek, no matter how long it took.
A great deal of time had passed since she’d started down the gravel road, then up State Road 21, past the grand mansion, to where she now stood looking up at the crest of the mountain. No one had seen her. Not a single car had gone by. Soon, she would be safe in Elmer’s arms. Then they could go back for the boys, leave here and start over, someplace far away where no one could find them.
Missy stopped and stepped to the edge of the road, and looked out at the horizon. Then at the valley below. A misty fog had rolled down off the mountain, casting the streetlights in an eerie, dim haze.
She thought about all the years spent in that house: the angry words, the rapes, the beatings. If only she hadn’t been forced to marry that monster. Maybe if her mama had still been alive, she could have talked some sense into Daddy to keep him from selling their baby girl into a life of desolation and despair. Things could have been so different if that drunken bastard had turned down the two hundred dollars he had gotten for her. She would have married Elmer, had his children. She could have been happy.
Two hundred dollars. Missy sighed and shook her head. A tractor, a couple of cows and some moonshine. Rot in hell, Daddy.
Missy returned to the pavement, continuing her journey until the road leveled out.
Five more yards and she would begin her descent into Weaver’s Creek. The hard part was over. From here on out it was all downhill. A car coming up the mountain captured her attention. Moments later, twin beams of light flashed across the road, cutting a trail into the dark sky beyond the mountain’s edge. Maybe she could flag it down and catch a ride, talk them into taking her all the way to Elmer’s house. The car rounded the bend and the glaring headlights blinded her. Using a forearm to shield her eyes, she waved to the driver.
The car slowed and pulled alongside her, and Jason called out the window, “Well, well, if it ain’t my darlin’ wife run off to her goddamn hillbilly boyfriend. Didn’t think I knew about that shit, did ya?”
Missy stood at the side of the road, her world tilting sideways as her husband smiled at her, the ground seeming to crumble beneath her feet, sending the frightened woman freefalling into a deep, dark chasm, where Jason’s cruel warning came swirling down after her as he cut the engine and got out of the car: “You ever leave me… I’ll kill you!”
There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. If she went over the side she would plummet to her death. She ran for the front of the car, but Jas
on was on her before she could take two steps. He grabbed a fistful of hair and slammed her face against the fender. Blood washed down the side of his car as he spun her around, and Missy screamed, spraying blood and pieces of teeth onto his face, his coat and his chest while Jason smiled and licked his lips, pounding her down to the ground, until, laughing, he reached out and pulled her up by the front of her dress.
“I told you what I’d do, you goddamn bitch.”
Missy, gasping, eyes wide, raised a trembling hand to her face. “What have you done?”
“I ain’t done nothin’. You did it,” Jason said. “You just remember that on your way down to Hell.”
Missy’s words came out in a croaking squall of anguish, “My babies!”
“Don’t worry. You’ll be seeing them soon… real soon.”
Jason grabbed her around the throat, his powerful hands tightening like a steel vise as he laughed and cut off her air supply, and kept squeezing and laughing and shaking and squeezing, Missy gasping for breath, her eyes bulging and her face turning red; blood from her busted nose spattering her swollen tongue, which hung loose across a row of broken teeth. Something cold and dark gripped her heart as she clawed Jason’s powerful wrists, and looked over his shoulder at ghostly beams of light stretching over the mountain’s crest toward Weaver’s Creek. Visions of Elmer and Tony and Little Jason danced behind her eyes, smiling and waving in front of their little country cottage and white picket fence… waving at the woman they loved and who loved them back with all of her heart, until the lights faded away, and Missy Thomas slipped into a darkness that would never release her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
James Hastie looked up at a row of books lining the shelves of Pitch’s library. He tried counting them, tried reading the leather-bound spines, anything to take his mind off what had happened in the sinister light of the torches. Something had entered the basement. He was sure of it. Something cold and dark and black as night. Pitch had summoned it there. From where, Hastie had no idea, and he didn’t want to know. He was sure of something else, too: he never wanted to feel its presence again.
He sat on the plush leather couch, a bottle of whiskey on the coffee table in front of him, hoisting a glass and cursing the day he’d ever crossed paths with Pitch. At first, Hastie had thought him to be nothing more than a crafty businessman, an ex-carnival huckster using hypnotism to bend people to his will. It hadn’t taken him long to realize he had bitten off more than he could chew. Pitch was much more than a crooked investor with a mean streak. He was evil, and had proven it in New York with William Jennings’ little grandson, and again tonight with another innocent child strapped to that hideous slab of stone. He shuddered to think what might have happened after he fled up the stairs. How, Hastie wondered, (and not for the first time) had he ever gotten himself into such a mess? What kind of madness had he involved himself in?
“Oh, there you are.”
Hastie, cringing at the sound of Pitch’s voice, turned to see him walking toward him.
“You should have stuck around. I could’ve had Arleta polish your knob for you.” Pitch, chortling, added, “After she got through with her son’s, that is.”
The thought of it made Hastie queasy. He gulped the rest of his whiskey, wincing and gritting his teeth as it went down, and then sat the glass on the table.
Pitch walked over and picked up the Jack Daniels, put the bottle to his lips and took a swig. “Why’d you run out on me? You missed quite a show down there.”
“Show? Is that what you call it?”
“It is what it is, Jimmy.” Pitch poured some whiskey into Hastie’s empty glass.
“Now,” he said. “Why did you run away?”
“I got scared. Something came into that room. Something brushed up against my legs. I… I felt it.” Hastie picked up the glass, which shook when he raised it to his lips, sloshing whiskey onto his lap that painted a quarter-sized stain on his navy-blue trousers.
Pitch took another swig. Staring at the young gangster, he said, “You’re really starting to disappoint me, Jimmy. I take you under my wing and make you rich, and this is how you act?”
“I… I didn’t sign on to kill little boys.”
“Did I ask you to kill that child?”
Hastie didn’t respond.
“Oh, Jimmy.” Pitch shook his head, and ran a hand through his jet-black hair. “What am I gonna do with you? Where’s the brave young gangster I met at the track that day? You took your own best friend down to your uncle’s meat house and watched them grind him into hamburger patties, but you’re afraid of my basement?”
Hastie took a deep breath, raised the glass and took another drink. He had thrown down a considerable amount, and could feel the alcohol swirling through his system. His eyelids were heavy, his legs like rubber. But he didn’t think he could ever drink enough to go back down those stairs. “I can’t go back down there.”
“Well then, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Jimmy Quick. That’s exactly where you are going. Right now.”
“No… You don’t understand… Please… I can’t. I won’t.”
Pitch leapt out of his chair. “You can. And you WILL!” He kicked the coffee table, banging it against Hastie’s shins, sending the nearly empty glass shattering to the wooden floor.
“Goddamn it,” Pitch said. “Look at that fucking mess. Come on, get up.”
Hastie stood up on unsteady legs, while Pitch laughed and shook his head. “Look at you, you stupid fucker. You’re too drunk to be scared. C’mon.”
Hastie followed Pitch out of the room. “Please,” he said when they got to the kitchen. “Don’t make me go back.”
“You whining, fucking pussy,” Pitch said, and then walked into the pantry and grabbed a metal mop bucket and flung it into the kitchen, where it clanged off the tiled linoleum floor, spinning to a stop near Hastie’s feet. Locating a box of soap powder and a mop, he carried them into the kitchen, where he found Hastie standing by the sink, holding the bucket.
Pitch crossed the floor and shoved the carton into Hastie’s stomach, and the New Yorker doubled over.
“Here. This is all the fuck you’re good for now: cleaning up my messes. Maybe I’ll make you my houseboy.”
Hastie opened the box and dumped some granulated powder into the bucket, filled it three quarters full of water and sat it on the floor, while Pitch, who had walked over to a closet, opened the door and grabbed two thick, white towels. “Now, come on.”
“Please…” Hastie began. “Please don’t make—” but the disgusted scowl on Pitch’s face cut him short.
The mop in one hand, Hastie picked up the bucket and followed Pitch into the pantry. When they got to the stairs, Pitch stood aside. “You first,” he said. “And if you say one word, you whine one time, I’ll put my foot in your back and shove you the fuck down those stairs.”
Hastie rolled the mop and bucket across the floor, toward the row of flaming torches, where Pitch stood beside Jack Colbert’s blood-splattered corpse.
“Over here,” Pitch said, motioning Hastie forward.
Hastie hurried over to the dead mine foreman. “What happened to him?”
Pitch laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Hastie looked down at the gory pit in Colbert’s head, the bloody puddle beneath it, and shrugged his shoulders. This he could handle, no problem. This he was used to.
But ten yards ahead, the child lay perfectly still on the altar, staring up at the ceiling while James Hastie’s guts turned into a slithering nest of vipers.
“Mop this mess up, Jimmy. Tomorrow I’ll have the mayor or one of his cronies help you carry him upstairs. Seeing how he was so full of shit, he should make a pretty good pile of fertilizer for my garden.
Hastie laughed. “No problem,” he said.
Pitch slapped him on his back. “Atta boy!” he said, as he tossed the towels on the floor—then, “Leave the mop and bucket and come with me.”
/> Hastie didn’t bother complaining. He didn’t dare. He followed Pitch around the front of the slab, up a set of concrete steps and across the intricately inlaid stone flooring.
When he passed by that gigantic, bestial statue, the vipers stirred in their nest.
“Over here, Jimmy.”
Hastie stepped up to the unholy shrine, where the child lay stiff, his vacant eyes looking toward the heavens, as if pleading for God to tell him: why? Hastie tried to focus on the child’s face, but his eyes wandered down. And the baby-faced hit-man knew he would never, ever be able to get that image out of his head: a ragged, inch wide gash lay across the child’s neck, revealing a severed windpipe directly above a chest that had been splayed open like a butchered cow’s. Tender little bones protruded from the two slabs ripped into his middle, and when Hastie saw that grisly pit, and realized what had been taken from it, he doubled over and vomited on the floor, drawing laughter from Pitch, who said, “You know you’re going to have to clean that up, don’t you?”
Hastie saw the silver chalice at the foot of the altar, the coagulated blood in its bottom, and retched up another volley.
“Goddamn it. Would you get a grip? You act like you’ve never seen a dead body before.”
Hastie got slowly to his feet.
“Now, pick him up.”
“What!”
“You heard me. Pick. Him. Up.” Pitch put a hand in Hastie’s back, nudging him forward. “We’re going to take him to a very special place. He’ll love it. His buddies are waiting for him there.”
Hastie scooped up the cold, stiff body, and like a groom carrying his bride across a marital threshold, he followed Pitch across the basement, past the torches and into the darkness, toward a faint sliver of light far in the distance. Across the great hall they went, until they found themselves standing in front of a door. A bright patch of light swept over them when Pitch turned the doorknob and swung the door outward, momentarily blinding Hastie. When he recovered, Pitch motioned him into a bright pink room with tiled linoleum flooring, populated by a bed, a chest of drawers and a mirror, and three withered skeletons the same size as the dead body in Hastie’s arms, the three of them stacked up in the corner like cords of wood. The one on top was split open down the middle, and Hastie knew if he examined the other two, they would be in the same horrible condition.
Lord of the Mountain Page 13
