“No!” Frank yelled. “Stop it!”
The hole in the floor was between him and Teri, but Evan was easy to reach across an open space, and Frank lurched toward him. “You bastard!” he screamed. “I’ll make sure you never fucking escape!”
This was my opportunity, and the instant he stepped away from the pit, I dove forward.
The knife was near—too near—one of the miniature gods, and the back of my hand brushed the creature as I grabbed the handle of the blade. I felt searing heat and excruciating cold, a repugnant texture against my skin that made me think of congealed mucus.
Without thinking, without stopping to ponder options or consider strategies, I raised the knife and drove it into the midsection of the small figure. Acting on instinct, I drew the blade through the soft flesh, cutting the body in two. Maybe there were words I was supposed to say, symbols I was supposed to carve, but I knew nothing about any of that, and I trusted in the power of the blade itself to extinguish the creature’s life.
No such luck.
I successfully cut the form in half, but the god did not die. Its white flesh quivered and flowed, rearranging itself, and then there were two of them instead of one.
I needed to kill Frank.
Looking up from the still-developing bodies, I saw that this might be easier than I thought. Frank had indeed grabbed Evan, but Evan was defending himself with his hammer, landing blows to Frank’s midsection that seemed to be doing actual damage, and Teri had come around from the other side of the pit and was attacking with her hatchet from the rear. I saw no wounds, no blood, but Frank was being battered, and his wrinkled face was grimacing, pain evident as he winced with each strike.
Teri landed a blow with her hatchet, slicing into his shoulder, causing him to scream with fury.
Could they kill Frank? Possibly. But this was my fight. I had started us on this journey, I had brought us all here, and it was my responsibility to finish it. In my mind, I could still hear the voices of Billy and my dad as they’d sat on the couch playing with Simon, voices I had not heard for decades, that I’d almost forgotten, and it was the silencing of those voices, the loss again of my family, that spurred me forward.
If anybody was going to kill Frank, it was going to be me.
Did I have any moral qualms? No. I had never killed anyone, could not even remember ever getting into a fight or hurting another person, so this went against everything I’d ever stood for, everything I was and wanted to be.
But I didn’t care.
I rushed toward him, knife at the ready.
“You can’t—” Frank began.
And I stabbed him in the throat.
There was a shift in the air around us. His voice dissolved into a drowning gurgle as blood spurted and he collapsed, the life draining from his body. The figures on the dirt twisted and withered, white flesh darkening to gray and then to black, the no longer humanoid forms emitting high-pitched sounds like the screaming of dying squirrels, their substance leeching into the dirt and creating a muddy mess.
Frank stopped moving, blood trickling now instead of spurting from the wound in his neck. Above our heads, the ceiling disappeared, and, past it, I could see the house, Frank’s house, the rooms shifting, changing position, walls and floors gradually fading. It was not an instantaneous process. We stood there unmoving while the activity continued, and at the end of it, the only thing left was the open stone room we were in and the adjoining plywood construction that we had managed to partially demolish. In back of that, we could see the world outside, the rental car in which we’d arrived, and the dirt road through the desert beyond.
Holding Teri’s hand, I hurried out, in case the opportunity to leave was once again taken away. Evan followed quickly. From this vantage point, I could see bits and pieces of the house that were still extant. There was no gigantic pile of rubble as might have been expected from a building that size, only individual sections of wall, occasional freestanding doors and a few stairway segments. Here and there, men and women were staggering about, freed from whatever trap, cage or dream in which Frank had had them ensnared.
Mark’s body lay just outside the door we had used to enter the building, which was still standing strong within its frame. He was dead, mutilated by some sort of wild animal—
or monster
—but he had not been dead for long. There was a lot of blood, and the blood was still fresh, not dried. I walked over to where he lay, grief-stricken with the knowledge that he had been another victim, that he had not lived to see our victory over Frank. The one goal of his life had been denied him, and my eyes filled with tears as I recalled the little boy who’d lived across the street, my friend. If I’d had a jacket, I would have placed it over his face, but I didn’t, and I turned away disconsolately, leaving his open, permanently terrified eyes to stare vacantly up at the sky.
“Hey!” One of the wandering men was waving at us, trying to get our attention, and as he approached, I saw that it was Twigs. He held up his camera, grinning hugely. “I got some amazing shit, here, man! Amazing shit! This is going to be one hell of a show!”
I wiped the tears from my eyes, scanning the remaining individuals stumbling about, but saw no one I recognized. There was no sign of Owen, and I assumed the worst. Teri was on the same wavelength. “I don’t see Owen,” she said.
I shook my head. “I don’t, either.”
“Holy shit,” Twigs said, recognizing Evan beneath the years. “What happened to you?”
I didn’t hear the writer’s response. I was looking down at the bloody knife in my hand. In the bright sunlight, I could see a lined pattern tempered into the blade, intricate carvings in the handle, which appeared to be made of ivory or bone.
Amidst the chaos, practical considerations reasserted themselves, and I realized it was entirely possible that I could be charged with murder. Beyond the remnants of the rickety plywood room, the roofless stone chamber still stood, an island of permanence among the ruins of insubstantiality. There seemed no threat to it now, and I let go of Teri’s hand and retraced my steps, intending to toss the weapon into the pit. The hole was still there, but Frank’s body wasn’t, and almost as soon as my mind registered that fact, he lunged for me.
Like the stoic bleached policemen still standing against the stone, Frank had blended into the wall, as motionless as a corpse, waiting for me. He was dead, as the gaping hole in his throat and the blood that covered his clothes attested, but somehow he had become reanimated, and he attacked me with a ferocity I had never seen before. The expression on his face was frozen—and the unsettling half-smiling countenance reminded me of nothing so much as the way he had looked peeking out of his pickup window the first time he had offered me and Billy a ride—but his arms and legs were flailing like a madman’s. It was luck more than intent that allowed the knife to strike home when I lashed out to defend myself. I stabbed outward, and the blade passed between Frank’s grasping hands and into his chest. I twisted it, pulled out and was ready to strike again, but his body collapsed in front of me and lay still, crumpled on the ground. No blood spilled from the new wound, but through his torn shirt, I could see that the skin around the gash had turned a deep black.
I backed up, afraid he was going to come to life yet again, but his body remained unmoving. On impulse, I did throw the knife into the hole, then grabbed Frank’s right arm, the one on top, and dragged him out of the stone room, thinking it might have had something to do with reviving him.
Police cars were arriving. I could hear their sirens approaching, see the dust from their tires. The psychic had made her way back to San Antonio and contacted the law.
I pulled Frank over the ply board floor of the adjoining room and left him on the desert ground beyond, his head hitting a rock where I dropped him.
Teri had taken my hand, pulling me away, and I suddenly realized that I was crying again. Police
cars, sheriff’s SUVs, county jeeps, pickup trucks, a whole convoy of vehicles had arrived and were braking to a halt next to our own rental car. Uniformed officers emerged, moving slowly, obviously confused.
Eventually, I knew, they would find Frank’s body and take it back to San Antonio, where it would be cremated or receive a proper burial. Either way, it would be hundreds of miles away from this place, the onetime location of Plutarch, the location where he was supposed to be interred.
He would wander, then, yet another homeless spirit, and that made me feel good. The bastard did not deserve to be at rest, and I hoped that whatever afterlife he had was wretched, unbearable and endless.
Teri held me close. I was still crying, but there was a sense of gratification mixed in with the tears.
A man in a sheriff’s uniform approached, a bewildered expression on his face.
Whatever had been here was gone, and the only things left were aftereffects and questions.
I glanced over at Frank’s lifeless body. He was dead, and I was glad. He would never repair another roof, fix another floor, remodel another room, build another house.
For Billy, I thought proudly, the tears rolling down my cheeks.
For Billy.
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The Handyman Page 33
