The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  Like a tombstone.

  And Walker realized that the kid had already been goosed, he already had as much as his system could bear, but some asshole had fucking neglected to tag him . . .

  . . . and all Walker could do was watch him die . . .

  It was like that again, right down to the screaming; only the kid in question was clearly marked this time. Not with a tag; he didn’t need one. It was all written down in the dissipation of his features, the slow but steadily quickening erosion of his body, mind, and soul.

  Momma, he silently lamented. All these years, all this trouble . . . why did it all have to come down to one goddamn blind dying genius-junkie?

  Then the chopper landed, and the door flew open, and Locke and Keynes were there. There were no smiles or exchanges of greeting, though they hadn’t seen each other in nearly nine months. Walker had radioed ahead. They knew what was going on.

  In less than a minute the nurse and the gurney bearing Alex Royale were being shuttled back to the mansion. Walker and the rest filed out solemnly, hoofed it the rest of the way. Out across Richmond Terrace, the oily waters that spared them from the Jersey chemical vats gleamed like black glass.

  The Scream was, at long last, home.

  And, for better or worse, the waiting was almost over.

  * * *

  TWENTY-ONE

  Little brother . . .

  Alex heard the voice, but faintly. A whisper through the screams. There was little in the room that he was aware of: the rustle and creak of the bed as they laid him down, the clink and tinkle of the IV, the prick of the needle, the soft murmur of voices and gently bleeping monitors. Even the warbling sounds he made were background noise to him now.

  What senses he had left were directed inward, pulled into the dark place that his soul had become.

  And the even deeper darkness on the other side.

  Little brother, listen to me . . .

  It was Rod. Close now. Waves of warm breath brushing his ear.

  You have to be strong, Bucky. You have to. We’re right at the palace gates now, and there’s nothing to stop us but ourselves.

  He wanted to cry out, to cry out warning. But he had no will, no control over his body, the cold and the dark were sucking him down . . .

  If you give up now, it will all have been for nothing. Do you understand me?

  Down to the place where the hell-thing waited . . .

  Can you hear me, little brother?

  I need you.

  Waited with its cold dark constant smile . . .

  Shit.

  And then the voice and the breath pulled away, and the sound of his brother’s suddenly furious shouts blended in with the beeps and the clinks and the rest of the fog on the outside.

  Leaving the inside free.

  For the screams to resume.

  Rod was royally fucking pissed. It went very well with his terror. The two emotions danced together divinely, a swirling performance at the core of his being. So much for equilibrium. So much for being able to think.

  Oh, yes, he was here at the mansion. Oh, yes, he had money and power and freedom falling out of his asshole. Oh, yes, he was the bloody Crown Prince of Darkness he had always envisioned himself to be.

  But things were going on that he had no knowledge of. That he had no control of. Behind his back.

  And Alex was dying. Really dying, this time.

  So where did that leave him?

  I don’t know, he told himself. But it feels like nowhere. He credited himself with having that much perception. If Alex goes, my bargaining power is out the window. They’ll be on me in a second. They will fucking eat me alive.

  And I can’t let that happen.

  I won’t let that happen.

  Rod thundered down the upstairs corridor, away from the room where his brother’s life was being held in tender abeyance. It was long and dark, and its pale white walls were sumptuously attired with great bleak antique portraits in massive oak antique frames. Ordinarily he would have loved to linger with the old dead farts; it had been so long, and his soul had been hungering for a deep quaff of the mansion’s deliciously sinister atmosphere.

  But he was scared, and he was pissed, and homecoming was affording him no joy at all.

  There was only one place to take the madness he felt.

  There was only one thing to do.

  The stairs led down. He followed them to the main floor, the foyer, then doubled rapidly back to his left, steering clear of the huge rehearsal room that dominated the heart of the mansion. Past the black steel door lay the second stairwell, winding down into its bowels.

  He had given orders, upon his arrival, for the bordello to be stocked. It was pleasing to discover that, in at least one respect, things had not completely fallen apart. There was two fine specimens awaiting him: drugged, trussed up, and ready for action.

  “Ah,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him.

  The one on his right was a female. Young, maybe sixteen. Very pretty, in an underdeveloped Olivia Newton-John kind of way. They had left on her underwear, as per his request. It was very nice underwear: scanty and lacy and black. Revealing. Good choice. Apparently little Olivia was kinkier than her surface might denote.

  Nice body, too. They had damaged it very little in the course of her abduction. Her breasts had just a bit of sag, like a sow in need of milking. Her ass was flat, not as curved as he liked. Then again, so was her tummy, and he liked that quite a bit.

  All in all, he found her most satisfactory.

  The one to his left was a man. Evidently the abduction had gone a little less easily with this fellow. His eyes were swollen; and though he’d been well cleaned, the tiniest trickles of blood still oozed from the freshly broken nose.

  No matter. No one would ever know. And Rod didn’t put nearly so high a premium on male beauty as he did on its female equivalent. He had the body type that Rod favored most: tall, pumped up, reeking redneck hostility. Even naked, it was clear that the guy favored Mets caps with their brims turned toward the back.

  Rod decided to call him Knute Rockne.

  Knute was most satisfactory, too.

  “Ah, yes,” Rod reiterated, stepping closer, allowing himself a smile. He felt better already. He truly did. He was a sucker for therapeutic recreation. “I’m very happy to see you tonight. I don’t know who you are, of course; I don’t know anything about you. But that really doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Neither one of them could speak, as such. The analgesic had seen to that. Nonetheless, he always insisted that their tongues be removed; his wish, as always, had been obeyed. When the drug wore off, he would not want words. He would want raw emotion, primeval and pure.

  “You are here for my pleasure.” He paused for a moment. Their eyes broadcast fogbound but nonetheless poignant terror. Olivia’s eyes, in particular, were inspiring. He smiled and began to unbutton his shirt.

  “More specifically: you were born for my pleasure. I hope you appreciate how splendid that is. It’s not everyone who gets chosen to be my honey-love, after all. You should think of yourselves as something rather special.”

  Rod’s shirt was custom tailored and cost an even four hundred dollars. One of its design imperatives had been that it unbutton at the vertical slide of a hand. For four hundred smackers, that was easily arranged. The first stage of his striptease went off impeccably.

  “You may have had dreams of your own. In fact, I’m quite sure of it. Who doesn’t? I had a dog once. It often dreamed. I figured, ‘If Hildegard can do it, anyone can.’ Was I wrong?”

  Knute moaned. Olivia chirruped. Between them, not a whit of articulation. Rod sometimes wondered why he even bothered to ask.

  He slipped off the shirt, tossed it carelessly to the floor behind him. His naked torso gleamed. He liked to tan. He tanned superbly.

  He began to unbutton his pants.

  “The point is: your dreams were wrong. They couldn’t help but be. You didn’t kn
ow what destiny had in store. You couldn’t have. I mean”—and he chuckled—“what in the world would have made you think that you’d get to meet someone like me?”

  Rod checked to see if Knute’s pecker was enlarging. It was, just a little. That was always nice. Big macho homophobes, in his experience, stood an eighty percent chance of getting a harden in moments like this. The reluctant subconscious poking out, so to speak. He gave it a tweak. Knute’s subconscious, at the moment, was a plump kielbasa of dread.

  Rod turned his attention toward little Olivia, caressing her shoulder, tracing one long-nailed finger along the sculpted ridge of her collarbone until he encountered the black lace strap of her brassiere. This he slid lovingly over her left shoulder, unfettering her breast and allowing it to sag just a touch to its full glory. He took it in hand, hefting the flesh like a ripe melon at market, careful to avoid the nipple, which was large and pink and fully capable of hardening of its own accord, given the proper mood.

  Rod was a master of proper mood. He squeezed the breast and stared into Olivia’s spinning eyes. She whimpered.

  The nipple went stiff.

  He smiled again, broadly, and strolled over to his throne. This was no time for dallying, and his boots required removal. He sat down and slipped them off, one at a time. His socks followed suit. Nobody spoke.

  Surprise, surprise.

  “God, I feel good!” It was true. His body tingled all over, and he was beginning to perspire. Like the old saying goes, he said to himself. If spit don’t work, it ain’t troo love.

  With his pants undone, his own beautiful bone was showing through his red bikini briefs: eight inches of personal pride. He hoped that Knute was responding. Knute was. Olivia, too. What a splendid pair!

  Rod slipped his pants off and stood again. He stretched, flexed, sighed expansively.

  And for the first time since his return, drank in the details of his beloved bordello.

  It was a good-sized subterranean room, thirty-five by twenty (though it seemed far bigger), with no windows and a very high ceiling. For the convenience of the rest of the household, it was utterly soundproofed. The lighting was excellent, largely on behalf of the three strategically placed vidicams. Two excellent directional mikes dangled from the ceiling. Bose monitors in each corner tickled the air with lush surround-a-sound.

  This was not to mention the endless varieties of exotic apparatus that dominated the room. The elaborate chain-and-pulley devices that held his guests in place, to begin with. And oh so many more.

  And then, of course, there were the mirrors.

  They lined the walls, the floor, the ceiling. They arced and angled in geometric perfection, made the bordello a kaleidoscope of reflected light and image. You could see yourself, at virtually every angle, from virtually any spot in the room. This was of the utmost importance.

  Watching, after all, was half the fun.

  “You know”—he turned back to his audience—“you may find this hard to believe, but I grew up in a place like this. My father was an enthusiastic libertine, a great admirer of the grand Marquis: de Sade, that is. You are familiar with his work?”

  Mssr. Rockne and Mile. Newton-John stared blankly at him, eyes swimming in pain and confusion and terror. Rod noted, with some distaste, that they had both begun to drool a bit. A side effect of the drug: one that he was wholly familiar with, but that he still found somewhat unappetizing.

  “No matter.” He shrugged. “My father was a surgeon. Of course, his understanding of the human body was superb. What makes it work. What makes it fail. What kind of injuries can be sustained, and for how long.

  “Most of all, he was an expert on pain.

  “And pleasure.”

  Rod was definitely getting excited now. He could feel his pulse in the tips of his fingers, and his briefs were under enormous strain. Hold back, he told himself emphatically. All good things come to those who wait. . . .

  There was a table full of implements before him. He savored each in turn. The scalpel. The bone saw. The twelve-inch dildo with the blunted metal studs. The fourteen-inch dildo with the sharpened metal studs. The electric nipple-clamps. And so on. And so on.

  He had missed his toys immeasurably. It had been a long nine months, with precious little true libertinage to boast of. It was too easy to get caught on the road; and most of the security had been diverted toward Tara, that bitch. Her, and her little fucking army . . .

  But that’s over now, he snapped at himself. I’m home now.

  And all that is going to change.

  He tried to regain the moment, to shake off the effects of the insidious digression. Too late. One thought of Tara and the poison began to spread: slow-moving, hot, and dark as molten tar. His body still tingled, but the quality had changed.

  The rage was back.

  The killing rage.

  It was time to make his first selections, get on with the show. Tonight it wasn’t too difficult. Ordinarily in such cases he opted for chivalry; but there was something about this particular man that made Rod chomp at the bit. There would always be more ladies-first scenarios to enjoy.

  And besides, he would be opening the door for her.

  Later.

  This left the selection of the opening device. Again, the decision was unorthodox but immediate. “Inspector Royale,” he said aloud in a convincingly stodgy British accent. “Can you solve the mystery?” Then he smiled and in a different voice said, “Certainly. With pleasure.

  “Mssr. Rockne. In the bordello.

  “With the instruments of his choice.”

  The table of goodies before him was one of three, and all of them had wheels. He rolled the first one forward, brought it to rest in front of the stud. “Take your time. Think about each of these items in turn. I’m sure you’ll come up with several creative uses for each of them. I’ll discuss my own favorite techniques in a moment. Then we’ll, you’ll pardon the expression, come to an agreement. No problem?”

  Knute’s red and swollen eyes were as wide as they could get. He let out a piteous caveman sound.

  “Delightful. Now you stay right there.”

  As he turned to fetch the second table, he thought about his father. He often did, especially in moments such as this. What a superior man his father had been! How strong and courageous, how uncowed by the bogus morality of the weak and trembling. Where most men recoiled from the force of their own desires, Father had waded straight in, daring sensation to overwhelm him, daring God to strike him down.

  Which of course, he told himself, was never going to happen.

  Because there was no God; and if there was, Man had misunderstood Him completely. The simple fact was that God punished the meek. Nature punished the meek, every step of the way. One look at any point along the food chain was proof, and only a hypocritical lying coward would deny it. Only a weak hypocritical lying coward stood to gain from proclaiming the myth of morality.

  Because morality purported to make men equal; and everybody knew that that was bullshit. No fucking way were men born equal.

  There were the great ones.

  And then there was everybody else.

  The second table was full of surprises for Knute. Rod gripped it with suddenly trembling fingers and steered it around, turning back the way he had come. Light glistened on the implements. A beautiful sight.

  Such perfection in the way things were.

  Like Knute and Olivia. How perfectly they hung, trussed to their devices, in absolute accordance with physical law. What perfect specimens of inferiority they were, proving the rule by providing no exception. One had to assume that the Creator, if there was one, knew what the fuck He was doing.

  If there indeed was a God, he reasoned, He clearly intended for the fierce and the cruel and the powerful to prevail.

  Alex never understood that, damn his pussy soul. Alex had not been able to sustain the privilege of his position. Because he was weak, he empathized too much with the weakness of others. It dragged him do
wn.

  And it was pathetic, because Alex was so obviously superior to virtually everyone that he met. Playing Mozart at five. Playing Tchaikovsky at eight. A genius computer programmer by the time he was ten. The boy was an absolute genius at everything he touched. There was no instrument he could not master, no system he could not analyze and absorb, no style that he could not grasp and transform, no horizon beyond his reach.

  Little brother . . .

  Rod found himself in front of his captives again. He was startled and annoyed by the intrusion of flat reality. He positioned the table beside its counterpart, turned away without a glance. He was thinking. He did not want to be bothered with them just yet.

  He was thinking.

  Little brother . . .

  Little brother was a lousy libertine. In fact, he was no real libertine at all. He had no taste for dominance. He had no real capacity for aggression. He got no pleasure from rapine and torture and death. The only way to even get him down to the bordello was by force, in a submissive role, and he usually cried all the way through that.

  Rod and Dr. Royale were confounded. This was not like family. Even Mom—who Rod and Alex had only met on the inside, and who had died giving birth to the twins—had been an intrepid devourer of pleasure in her day. The studded dildos were her legacy.

  But there was no precedent for Alex.

  One thing was for certain: if he would not participate, he could not be trusted in the outside world. Stupid or not, they lived in a nation of laws; and the dedicated libertine had much to fear from society at large. There could be no Cub Scouts, no day care, no school. Just a tutor, a governess, and a maid, all three of whom were utterly loyal to the doctor.

  Alex had his private education, and a damn good one at that. He had his music and unlimited freedom in which to pursue it. He had fine clothing, good food, exquisite shelter.

  But he had no friends but Rod, and no concept of the world outside those four sheltering walls.

  Poor little Alex . . .

  Little brother . . .