Soultaker

by Bryan Smith

  She cast her gaze about the kitchen surreptitiously, moving her eyes without moving her head as she searched for weapons. There was a large—and bloody—carving knife on a chopping block on the counter. Angela had used it to chop lengths of intestine. Jordan recalled the image of the glistening viscera, a long, wet rope of it coiled on the chopping block, and felt her stomach rumble.

  Angela’s eyes narrowed. “Why is she staring at that knife?”

  Bridget raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, Jordan. Why are you staring at that knife?” She laughed. “Tell you what, we’ll make a contest of it.”

  Jordan’s heart skipped a beat and she felt a tightness in her chest. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you have a low opinion of my intelligence, Jordypoo,” Bridget said, “but you should know better by now. You know I’m not the ditzy bimbo I pretend to be. You’re so transparent.” She giggled again. “You’re easier to read than a best-selling novel. What I’m saying is, you’ll never make it in Hollywood.”

  Angela laughed. “She’s no Meryl Streep.”

  “Marisa Tomei is Meryl Streep compared to this hag-in-training.”

  Angela snorted. “That one-fluke wonder. Hell, that’s nothing. You ever see Paris Hilton in House of Wax? That’s some Juilliard School of the Arts shit compared to Jordan.”

  Jordan felt something cold and hard settle within her. “You know what, fuck both of you.”

  Bridget gave her a mock pout. “Oh, you’d love to fuck me. We’re already aware of that.”

  Jordan wanted to lash back at Bridget, but the pure truth of the matter was she was right. She bit her lip and said nothing.

  Bridget grinned. “Now about that contest.”

  Jordan eyed her warily. “Yeah?”

  Bridget leaned across the table and leered at her. “It’s really more of a race. Here’s the deal. We’ll have Angela here count to three. On three, you and I make a dash for the knife. Get there first, you get to live. Get there last, you get to hurt. Sound fair?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Jordan glanced at Angela. “Because I’m outnumbered. Even if I got there first, this cunt would come after me.”

  Bridget shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. But it’s the only chance you’ve got. Ready to start the countdown?”

  Jordan’s heart was racing. She looked at the knife. She looked at Bridget, felt her mouth go dry at the look of almost feral anticipation she saw there. “No. Please. It doesn’t have to be this way.” She felt moisture well in her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t want to die.”

  Bridget leaned even closer. Her eyes sparkled prettily beneath the ceiling light. “You weren’t listening like you should. I said, ‘Get there last, you get to hurt.’ I didn’t say a thing about dying. When I get my hands on that big-ass knife, I’ll have Angela hold you still while I cut on you for a while. But I’m not gonna kill you.”

  Jordan swallowed thickly. “Why not?”

  “It’s like I told you. You have a meeting with Lamia in your future. And you’ll need to be alive for that.” Her smile then radiated sheer madness. Seeing it made Jordan want to curl up in a ball in a dark corner somewhere. “At least for a little while.”

  Jordan was shaking. Her breath hitched. A sob worked its way out of her throat, followed quickly by a moan of despair. A part of her felt shamed by this display. She should show some courage, or at least stoicism, in the face of this awful development. Anything to dampen the sadistic glee they were deriving from this.

  But she simply couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to die. Not like this. With no one who loved her around to help ease the transition into eternal darkness. With no goddamn dignity at all. “Please…please…I don’t want to die…”

  Bridget and Angela laughed in unison.

  Jordan dabbed tears from her eyes. “Can’t either of you see how insane this is? Don’t either of you have a shred of human decency left? Why would you want to participate in this…this…evil?”

  Bridget smiled. “Aside from being born into it, you mean?” She shrugged. “Frankly, I get off on it.”

  “Ditto like a motherfucker,” Angela said.

  Jordan groaned. “God…”

  Bridget’s tongue darted out, slowly traced the length of her lower lip. “Mmm. To be honest, I just love the way being all evil and shit makes me feel. All hot and bothered, you know?”

  A visible ripple of pleasure went through Angela. “Fuck, I’m getting all horny just thinking about it. I sure hope we get to kill somebody else to night.”

  Bridget said, “I think you can count on it. And speaking of counting, you should start.”

  Jordan sat up straighter in her chair. “Wait!”

  Bridget shook her head. “No more waiting.”

  Angela said, “One…”

  Bridget pushed her chair away from the table and scooted to its edge. “This is gonna be so much fun. You ready to start hurting again, Jordy-poo?”

  “Two…”

  Jordan looked at the knife.

  Any moment now, Angela would utter the final number.

  Jordan leaped out of her chair, seized the knife, and whirled around to face her tormentors.

  She smiled at their identical thunderstruck expressions.

  Angela smacked the table with her palm and glared at Jordan accusingly. “No fair!”

  Relishing the feel of the word in her mouth, Jordan said, “Three.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The first thing Stu Walker was aware of upon regaining consciousness was the strange medicinal taste in his mouth. He couldn’t identify it, but a powerful chemical smell clogged his nostrils, too.

  Chloroform?

  At first blush, the very thought of it was crazy. It made him think of scenes from movies. Guy walking down a street, some black-clad guys pop a white cloth over his mouth, and the poor bastard gets shoved into the back of a black limo. Maybe he’s a superspy, maybe James Bond himself, and he’ll wind up outwitting his abductors. Or maybe he’s just some guy in over his head, a gambler in debt up to his eyeballs. Guy like that, you’ll never see him again. He’ll end up chained to a cinder block at the bottom of a lake or buried beneath the goalpost at a football stadium. Anyone could conjure up a thousand similar scenarios with ease. Because it was so cliche. Any casual observer of popular culture had seen countless variations on it.

  So it was ridiculous, really.

  But.

  Maybe it wasn’t.

  Maybe chloroform or some other chemical agent had been used to knock him out. The smell and the sore-throat tickle at the back of his throat made it hard to deny. But there was a bigger question to consider. Who would do this? He thought about it and hit a brick wall. He didn’t have any real enemies, certainly no one who hated him enough to do something like this. The whole situation just didn’t make any sense. Well, whatever was going on, he had been out like a light for hours. He knew that by the darkness visible through the bedroom window.

  He was in the master bedroom of the spacious lakeside cabin Lorelei’s parents owned. The room was dark, the only light courtesy of a single candle on the nightstand to his right. Its light revealed little of the room. He could see the nightstand, the bed’s gleaming brass headboard, and the window. The darkness was deeper at the other end of the room. He could just make out the shadowy outline of the bedroom’s open door. He sensed movement in the hallway beyond, motion defined by changing shades of darkness. He wondered who was out there, what kind of predator might have invaded the remote cabin, and that made him think of Lorelei.

  My God, what have they done to her?

  He pictured her as he’d last seen her, nude save for her stylish stiletto-heel boots, sprawled invitingly across the plush white rug spread in front of the fireplace. The image was the last thing he remembered. He marveled at the stealth of the intruder (or had there been more than one of the bastards?). He couldn’t recall any sense of danger. And he usually noticed such things. That a
bility to suss out danger—and to know when a tense situation was tilting toward violence—had served him well as a barkeep. Not many barroom brawls went down on his watch. But he couldn’t remember anything like that. There’d been no creak of the hardwood floor, no shadow falling over him, no warm breath tickling the hairs at the back of his neck.

  There’d only been Lorelei.

  Then the smell.

  Followed by the long, dreamless void of unconsciousness.

  His breath caught in his throat as he heard a click of heels on the hardwood floor. Something was moving through the deep darkness at the other end of the room, gaining definition as it approached, taking on a familiar form.

  A smile trembled around the corners of Stu’s mouth; then he let out a gasp of relief. “Lorelei. You’re alive.”

  He tried to rise as she approached the bed, but the ropes binding him to the headboard held him in place. He’d been so weak—and so groggy—that he’d been unaware they were there. He turned his wrists a bit, testing the bonds. There was no give to them at all. Someone had done an expert job of securing him to the bed.

  Lorelei stood over him now. “Hello, Stu.”

  “I’m so glad to see you.” Stu coughed. He felt lousy. Nauseated. The medicinal taste made him feel sick, like he was on the verge of coming down with the flu. He craved a cold beer to flush the taste away. “I was so afraid they’d done something horrible to you.”

  Lorelei laughed. “It’s yourself you should be worried about.”

  Stu frowned. “What? Why? They must have left, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be in here. I don’t know why they didn’t finish us off, but I’m so grateful they weren’t killers. But they might come back. You never know. You need to find a knife, a sharp one, and cut these ropes off me.”

  Lorelei didn’t answer.

  Stu looked at her with a mixture of awe, love, and sudden fear. She was as beautiful as she’d been all those years ago. Her perfect, trim body was as toned as it had been in their high school days. It was as if the last decade had melted away. They were back together, as they’d been destined to be all along. How empty his heart had been during all those wasted years. He’d never stopped wanting her, and, like a miracle, she was his again. But maybe not. Because she was behaving very strangely. And it made no sense that ruthless home invaders would leave her alive and unbound. A quick study of her nude, and very lovely, body revealed no marks or damage of any kind.

  “Lorelei…what’s going on here?”

  She smiled. “I’m doing my duty. This is my sacrifice. My way of honoring the goddess. I do love you, Stu. But I love Lamia more.”

  Stu coughed again. “I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lorelei’s smile broadened. “Of course you don’t, baby. And you don’t need to. And I’m sorry, but the worse it is for you, the greater my eventual reward will be.”

  Stu’s head was swimming. He felt like he was in a dream. He knew now Lorelei meant to harm him. Probably kill him. And as bad as that was—he definitely didn’t want to die—the inability to understand what was going on here was even worse. He wanted to know why this was happening. Maybe she had lost her mind at some point during their years apart. That must be it. It was the only thing that could explain the nonsense talk about “sacrifice” and “honoring the goddess.” And as he considered the likelihood of Lorelei’s madness, the terror that had taken root within grew exponentially. His heart slammed in his chest and his eyes filled with tears. He had so much left he wanted to do in life.

  It couldn’t end like this. So soon and unexpectedly.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Lorelei knelt and lifted a black plastic garbage bag off the floor. She flashed a smile disturbing in its gleefulness and dumped the bag’s contents on the bed next to him. Stu lifted his head and saw a funnel affixed to a length of vacuum hose, a roll of duct tape, a knife, and a bottle of extra-strength Drano.

  He let out a whimper and showed Lorelei a beseeching look. “No…nonono…you can’t.”

  Lorelei laughed. “Oh, but I can.”

  Tears spilled in hot streams down Stu’s face. “No. Jesus…no…”

  Lorelei’s eyes turned hard. “It’s Lamia you should be praying to, Stu.”

  She picked up the length of vacuum hose and shoved it through his wide-open mouth, killing a burgeoning sob. Stu’s eyes went wide and he tried to push the hose out of his mouth with his tongue. But Lorelei climbed atop him and planted a knee on his chest, then used her leverage to shove the hose deeper down his throat. He gagged and coughed, and the rapid slamming of his heart sounded like thunder in his ears. Through it all, Lorelei laughed.

  She wrapped several layers of duct tape around his head to better secure the hose.

  Then she used the knife to cut him.

  The cutting went on for a seeming eternity. Lorelei licked his wounds and painted her body with his blood.

  The pain was immense. Staggering. All of existence was pain, it seemed. And yet, it afforded him a small mea sure of peace, because he knew it couldn’t get any worse than this.

  But he was wrong.

  Lorelei picked up the Drano and slowly twisted the cap off the bottle, savoring the agony and helplessness in his expression.

  She smiled. “Bottoms up, baby.”

  She picked up the funnel and began to pour.

  And for Stu, things got a lot worse for a little while.

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  There was something strange about the rat in the corner of Jolene McAllister’s jail cell. Her cell was one of eight at the Rockville police station, and to night she was the township’s lone prisoner. She’d been grateful for the solitude in the beginning. She wanted to be away from people, away from the reality of the royal mess she’d made of her life. Here in this cell, removed from the detectives and their endless questions, she’d experienced a strange kind of peace. She could close her eyes and pretend she was in her own bed in her own home. The cot in her cell was a good deal less comfortable than her own bed, so it took a bit of imagination.

  But she managed.

  And she even succeeded in slipping into a blissful, dreamless sleep for a time. Until she heard the chittering of the rodent. The sound drew her back to grim reality. She heard the rodent scuttling across the floor of the cell, and the fleeting sense of peace she’d known deserted her. She was in jail. She was alone. And there was nothing at all she could do about it. She was going to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Never again would she see Trey, her best-loved son. The long-dreamed-of pilgrimage to Memphis, the city where she was born, would never occur. Her days of determining the course of her own life had come to an abrupt, irrevocable halt. The stark prospect sent her tumbling into depression, and she began to imagine ways she might kill herself.

  Then her gaze went to the corner and she saw the rat for the first time.

  Shit.

  That’s no motherfucking rat.

  Jolene’s mind whirled and her vision went blurry for a moment. The thing in the corner was an impossibility. So this could only be a dream. Except that the uncomfortably thin mattress upon which she lay felt exceedingly real. She could feel every ache in her old and creaky joints.

  Her vision cleared and she risked a peek at the corner again.

  Still there.

  Fuck.

  There were a lot of things wrong here. Scratch that. A lot of things weird here. And not just the central mind-fuck threatening to explode what remained of her sanity. For one thing, she shouldn’t have been able to see the thing in the corner at all. The corridor lights were off, rendering her cell and the others as dark as the inside of a coffin. Yet she could see the thing. Its eyes glowed like tiny specks of yellow neon, and the dim light allowed her to see the hazy outline of its little body.

  Jolene whimpered. “Go away! You’re not real!”

  The creature waddled closer and now she could no longer deny the reality of what she was
seeing. Nor could she pretend her mind was playing tricks on her. The thing was definitely not a rat. And the sounds emanating from its tiny mouth weren’t rodent sounds. The thing on the floor was her husband, somehow reduced to rat size. He was trying to talk to her, but he was too small for his words to be intelligible from this distance. Jolene would have to get down on the floor, put her ear down close to his shrunken body, to hear what he wanted to tell her—but she had no intention of doing that.

  Her mind again rebelled against the idea that Tiny Hal was real. Jolene was a junior high dropout, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She thought she had a pretty firm handle on what things were possible in the real world. What she was seeing now just wasn’t possible.

  And yet…

  The thing that could not be continued to stumble toward her cot. As it drew closer, Jolene was able to make out finer details, including evidence of her own handiwork, the ragged stumps where she’d cut off his fingers and cauterized the open wounds with an acetylene torch. And she could see the terror in his eyes. He was gesturing wildly and opening his mouth wide to scream at her.

  Jolene closed her eyes. “This is a dream. A nightmare. I’m going to wake up now.”

  Just because this felt real didn’t mean it was. She’d had dreams like that before. Some far worse than this. Real doozies, like the recurring one in which a masked serial killer chased her endlessly through a dark forest. The killer would inevitably close the gap between them, getting close enough to reach out to her with a gloved hand—and then she’d wake up with a gasp, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. The serial killer dream always seemed so real—the danger, the rough forest floor beneath her bare feet—and so it seemed safe to dismiss this episode as mental silliness, a case of her mind weaving her tragedy into a kind of dark farce. Very vivid and compelling, but a farce nonetheless.