he knew only that suddenly the women were no longer dancing, no longer celebrating. There was a wildness to their steps, danger in their motions. They seemed mad, almost maniacal, and he was frightened. His erection was gone, and he wished that they were safely back in the car and on their way home.
Now there was laughter behind them as well as in front of them, and it no longer seemed happy or joyous. He turned his head, saw a nude woman dancing in the small clearing where he’d wanted to spread the blanket.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ann whispered.
He shook his head. Intentionally or unintentionally, these women, whoever they were, had surrounded them. It was now impossible for them to return to the car without being seen.
But why was he so afraid of being seen?
He didn’t know. But he was afraid, very afraid, and he wished he’d listened to Ann in the first place and left when they’d first heard the sounds.
He was grabbed from behind.
He tried to scream, but a hand was clamped over his mouth, a filthy hand smelling of wine and woman. He tried to lash out, tried to kick, tried to hit; but whoever was holding him was stronger than he was and held him tightly. He turned his head as far as he could to the left and saw a naked woman carrying Ann into the field. Two more carried him, following.
He couldn’t see for a moment, could see only the ground and dirty legs from the angle at which he was carried. Then he was thrown onto the ground. A small branch stabbed his side. He screamed with pain and heard the noise. They were no longer holding his mouth shut. He screamed as loud as he could, “Help!” at first, then just pure sound. Ann was screaming too, and the women still holding his arms and legs turned him so he faced her.
The women were ripping her clothes off, laughing, drinking from a bottle of red wine, the thick liquid spilling down their chins, down their chests, looking like blood.
What the fuck was happening?
He was filled with not only fear but panic—and with the certainty that both he and Ann were not going to get out of this, that they were going to die.
The first woman, the dancer they’d first seen, finished off the wine.
She was on top of Ann, facing backward, bottle in hand. “No!” Ann screamed, real terror in her voice. “No—!”
Her screams were cut off as the woman sat on top of her face and began shoving the thin end of the wine bottle viciously between her legs, in and out, in and out, thrusting with all of the strength in her arm, until the glass was opaque with blood.
“Ann!” Tim cried, but the other women were upon him now, ripping his clothes, pulling his hair. He went down. A finger found his eyeball, pressed in, and, with a stream of hot juices, pulled out. Teeth began ripping skin, rending flesh. Fingers were shoved into his anus, pulling, stretching, ripping. His screams were not even coherent, not even words.
The air was filled with the smell of salt and sex and heavy wine.
And they tore him apart.
It was long past her usual bedtime, but Penelope couldn’t sleep. She had always been sensitive to moods, oversensitive perhaps, and the mood when she’d arrived home had been tense. Her mothers seldom argued, and never in front of her, but they did have disagreements, and their differences came out in subtle ways, small changes in familiar rituals, purposeful transgressions of established etiquette. They no doubt thought that they were hiding their problems from her, sparing her, but this clandestine conflict had made her that much more sensitive to small shifts of emotion.
The current fight was big.
Ordinarily there were one or two mothers involved in a dispute, and the others covered for them as best they could, acting as arbitrators, preserving the facade in front of Penelope. But tonight they had all been unusually silent, unusually solemn when she arrived home. All except Mother Margeaux, who, for some strange reason, was not there.
Mother Felice asked Penelope a few perfunctory questions when she walked into the living room, but it was clear that even she was not interested in the answers, and the other mothers sat in obviously expectant silence, waiting for her to leave so they could resume their conversation.
She did leave, going to the bathroom and taking a hot shower, and when she’d gone into the kitchen afterward to get a drink of water, she’d heard her mothers talking in the living room. Their voices were low, cautious, almost conspiratorial, as if they were afraid of being overheard, and the clandestine tone of the conversation caused Penelope to tread softly and to halt in the hallway outside the door, listening.
“She’s our daughter,” she heard Mother Felice say.
“That doesn’t matter anymore.” Mother Margaret.
She moved away from the doorway, not wanting to hear any more, her heart pounding, the blood racing through her veins. She hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, closed the door and locked it.
She had not been able to fall asleep since.
Now she reached next to her, felt for her watch on the nightstand, held its vaguely luminescent face next to her eyes.
One o’clock.
She put the watch down, stared up into the blackness. More than anything, she wanted to sneak down the hall to Mother Felice’s room, to crawl into her favorite mother’s bed the way she used to, to find out what was wrong, what was happening, what they’d been talking about That doesn’t matter anymore —but that was not possible. Even though she knew her mother supported her, even though she’d heard her mother defend her, she could not be entirely certain that her mother’s sympathies were completely on her side. Mother Felice loved her, yes, but she was one of them too, and perhaps those loyalties were stronger.
One of them.
When had it become that? When had it turned into us versus them!
She wasn’t sure. But it was probably something that had been building for a while. She’d noticed, many times before, that although her feelings for Mother Felice had remained constant, she seemed to like her other mothers less and less as she grew older. She had never been sure if that was because she was changing or because they had changed. They had all seemed equally nice to her as a child, she had loved them all, but as she’d grown she’d begun to see the differences between them. And the difference between what they were like and what^ she had thought they were like. Mother Margeaux’s strength and focus began to seem bossy to her, her once admirable iron will autocratic and dictatorial. Mother Janine’s free spiritedness seemed for a while flighty and irresponsible, then self-destructive, then just plain crazy. Mother Margaret’s dispassionate intellectualism became cold, Mother Sheila’s single-minded study of the science of the grape annoying and nerdily fanatic.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe this was something all children went through. Teenage rebellion and all that crap.
Maybe.
But she didn’t think so.
The one thing which had not changed was that they all had equal power over her. If there were divisions of labor within the business, a hierarchical order with Mother Margeaux at the top, there was no such structure in their family life. At least not in regard to her. They were all her mothers, and if there were ever conflicting orders or requests or restrictions, it was up to her to resolve them. She had learned early on that it was impossible to pit one mother against another. They always took one another’s side.
Which was why she could not ask Mother Felice.
It was Dion’s influence too, she thought She had become much more assertive since she’d met him, more willing to stand up for herself and to openly disagree with or disobey her mothers. She saw her life now as he would see it, looked at it as an outsider would, and although she had always done that to a certain extent, it seemed as though now she was able to see, to know, to understand how truly strange her lifestyle was.
She didn’t fit into her own life.
That was the truth of it. She had been raised this way, but it hadn’t taken. She often felt like an outsider amongst her peers, but now she felt just as much an outsider around her mo
thers.
What would things be like if her father had lived?
She wondered about that more and more often lately. How would her life be different? How would she be different?
She wished she remembered her father, but she’d been too young when he died and everything she knew of him had come from her mothers. Even his appearance would have been a mystery had it not been for the photograph.
If he had only lived a little longer … She could remember nearly everything, almost all the way back to her birth, and if her father had lived a few months longer, she would probably have retained a memory of him as well. She clearly remembered lying in the crib, in the nursery when she was only a few months old, although, to be fair, her memory was probably not as accurate as she believed it to be, comprised as it probably was of not only real events but events imagined during childhood, the visualization of extrapolations from her mothers’
stories, a recollection of things she had thought about rather than seen. But the images, all of them, were so vivid, so real, that they seemed like things that had happened, not things that she had imagined later or heard about secondhand.
Only many of the things she remembered did not correspond to what her mothers told her.
That scared her.
In one clearly remembered dream image or flash of recollection, she saw Mother Janine, laughing, naked, covered with catsup, dancing in the moonlight in front of the nursery window. But that couldn’t be right, could it? That couldn’t have happened.
Maybe it could have.
That’s what frightened her.
She thought of those dreams of her father. Had that happened too? She could see in her mind a particularly vivid image that had recurred in several nightmares: her father, naked, screaming, held down by the rest of her mothers while Mother Margeaux licked the blood from a gaping wound in his chest.
She sat up in bed. Her mouth was dry. She reached next to her, felt around on the top of the nightstand for her glass of water, but she’d forgotten to bring it into the bedroom with her.
She kicked off the blanket and got out of bed. She could get a drink of water from the bathroom—the cup she used when she brushed her teeth was in there—but she did not like drinking bathroom water. She’d rinse her mouth out with it, but she would not swallow it. She knew that the sink water came from the same pipe as the water in the kitchen, but somehow the fact that it was in the same room as the toilet tainted it for her.
She’d go down to the kitchen.
Penelope opened her bedroom door as quietly as she could and stepped into the hall. The house was dark, and she noticed for the first time that it was completely silent. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, someone was always doing something, and there was activity, movement, sound, noise. But now her mothers were all asleep, all of the lights were off, and the dark silence seemed eerily oppressive.
She didn’t want to wake her mothers, so she didn’t turn on any lights but felt her way along the wall to the staircase. From somewhere below, from one of the shadeless windows in the kitchen perhaps, came a diffuse blue illumination that served to make the surrounding blackness darker.
There were chills on her arms, and she almost turned around and went back into her bedroom. There was something spooky about the house tonight, and though she’d lived in it all her life, though she’d gone up and down these stairs thousands of times, it felt different to her now.
She forced herself to start down the stairs. She was just being a baby, afraid of the dark. There was nothing here that wasn’t here in the daytime. And their security system made the house probably the safest structure west of the Pentagon. No one could be hiding in here. No one could have broken in.
She was not afraid of someone breaking in.
No, she had to admit, she wasn’t. She was trying to look at the situation logically, but her uneasiness was anything but logical. There was no sound basis for it, no reason why it should be there.
But it was.
She reached the bottom step and hurried to her right, through the doorway into the kitchen. Here, finally, she turned on a light. The small one above the stove. As she’d hoped, illumination drove away the fear. The objects around her were recognizable now—counter, sink, refrig erator, stove—and that air of threatening unreality which had existed only seconds before was effectively dispelled.
Nothing fought off monsters like light.
She opened the dishwasher, took out a glass, and turned on the faucet.
A figure passed in front of the window above the sink.
She jumped, almost dropped the glass, catching it only at the last second. Her first thought was: ghost. The figure had been pale, a blur of movement undistinguishable as a specific form.
Then she heard the familiar sound of the alarm being deactivated as a password was keyed into the panel outside the door, and in the dim circle of light on the other side of the window she saw Mother Margeaux.
What was she doing out this late? Where had she been?
The door opened, and Penelope stood there, glass in hand, as Mother Margeaux walked into the kitchen. She saw Penelope but said nothing, moving quickly and silently past her as though she wasn’t there.
Penelope said nothing either, simply watched her mother’s pale form fade into the darkness of the hall, her chill returning, wondering why her mother’s blouse was torn.
Wondering why it was stained with blood.
Horton stared at the empty wine bottle on the table before him. He’d been staring at it now for nearly twenty minutes, trying to figure out why it was empty.
He could not remember drinking the wine.
He knew he had done so. He was drunk and acutely conscious of the fact.
But he could not for the life of him recall the specifics of the event:
how long it had taken to finish off the bottle, where he had gotten the wine in the first place, when he had started drinking.
Blackout.
That’s what scared him. He’d known enough alkies in-J| his time to be familiar with the symptoms, and though he had been hitting the sauce a little heavier than usual ,| lately, it did not seem to him that he was having any difficulty controlling his drinking.
That was the problem—it never seemed that way to the person involved.
There was something else, though, something beneath | the surface fear of alcohol abuse that troubled him as he stared at the bottle, and it had to do with the wine itself.
Daneam.
Lezzie label wine. He’d heard of it, perhaps even seen a bottle here and there, but it had never been available, to ] his knowledge, to the general public.
And he could’ve sworn that he picked up this bottle at | Liquor Shack.
But he couldn’t remember for sure.
He rubbed his eyes, massaging them until they hurt. The effect that the wine seemed to have on him was different than that of any alcohol he’d ever drunk before. Instead of feeling lonely and alone, cut off from everything except himself and his sorrows, he felt … connected. To who or what he didn’t know, but the feeling of communing with others through the wine, through his intoxication, was there, and it was creepy.
He also felt … well, sexually excited. That was not something that usually happened either. To others, maybe, but not to him. He’d always found alcohol to be anything but an aphrodisiac. A de-sexualizer, if anything. Yet he was sitting here now with an erection, aroused after remembering the one time he and Laura had tried something kinky. She’d wanted him to cuff her to the bedposts and rape her, roughly, and he’d been happy to oblige, but when it came down to it, when she was manacled and spread-eagled before him, he’d been too inhibited and hadn’t been able to maintain an erection.
Now, though, thinking back on the incident, he had no problem keeping up his erection. It pressed painfully against his slacks, and he thought that if Laura was here right now, he’d throw her on the fucking floor and shove it up her pussy until she screamed.
He picked up the bottle. It felt comfortable in his hands, familiar, and he supposed that he’d held it as he drank the wine, though he could not remember doing so.
Blackout.
What the hell was happening here?
The phone rang, He sprang to his feet, instantly sober, already striding out of the kitchen toward the telephone in the living room. The phone never rang unless it was someone from the station calling him in, and some cop’s instinct, some perpetually responsible part of his brain automatically kicked into gear, immediately negating the effects of the alcohol.
He caught the phone halfway through the second ring. “Horton.”
“Lieutenant? This is Officer Deets. I’m on-site and patched through the station. We, uh, have what appears to be a double homicide here—”
“Cut the police talk. What happened?”
“Two teenagers. They were torn apart.”
Horton’s mouth was dry. “Where?”
“On South Street.”
“I’m on my way.”
Searchlights, flashlight beams, and the blue-red strobes 1 of patrol cars lit the lonely section of road between the^ entrance to the Daneam vineyards and the old Mitchellj ranch. Horton stood inside the roadblock next to the meat truck and lit up. The inhaled smoke felt good in his lungs. Warm. He exhaled, looked toward the Dodge Dart, where Mccomber and another uniform were dusting for prints. Someone had spotted the car a half hour ago and called in. Both sets of parents had already phoned the station hours earlier, worried about their kids, and when the plates of the abandoned vehicle matched the kids’ plates, Deets and Mccomber had been sent out.
They’d found the bodies in less than five minutes.
Or what was left of them.
Horton took a deep drag on his cigarette, trying not to think of that assembled pile of flesh and bone they’d bagged and packed in the meat truck. An adult was bad enough, but teenagers, kids … He looked up at the stars, wondering for the zillionth time how, if there was a God, /
He could allow shit like this to happen.
He hated this fucking job.
Dominion Page 20
