In the House of the Wicked rc-5

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  A sharp click interrupted his musings as the door popped open about a half inch. Stearns gave his driver a nod as he pulled open the door and slipped inside the building.

  It was dark in the entryway, lit by only a single bulb from an emergency light; its partner had burned out. There was a door below the emergency light, and Stearns moved toward it, careful to avoid the dust-covered pieces of office furniture that had been left in the hallway.

  Is that where Daphene is waiting?

  Stearns had been searching for his former lover for quite some time and had begun to believe that she had met an untimely end, when she had reached out to him. She had learned of the murders of Desplat and Montecello and feared the future for herself. They had arranged a meeting, and here he was.

  Stearns stopped short just before the door, encountering one of the largest rats he had ever seen. He considered grabbing something from the floor to throw at it, but the way it looked at him-unwavering as it balanced on its thick, gray haunches-was almost as if it were studying him.

  Verifying him.

  Seemingly satisfied, the rat turned its large, hairy body toward the door that opened with an offending buzz.

  Stearns stepped through the heavy door and began to follow the rat down a series of concrete steps. Wall-mounted emergency lights tinted the stairway an arterial red. They descended three levels, the already damp air growing more fetid with the nearly choking smell of urine.

  As he reached the last step, the rodent darted quickly away into a patch of darkness. Stearns could not see what waited beyond it, but knew that was where he needed to go.

  Cautiously, he entered the shadow. Something smelling of mildew brushed against his cheek, and he recoiled, then carefully reached out to touch what seemed to be velvet curtains. He pushed them roughly aside and entered another passageway. The rat was waiting for him and turned to scamper through an open doorway at the far end of the short corridor, where a flickering light in the room beyond beckoned.

  A sudden spasm of pain nearly sent Stearns to his knees, reminding him of what he needed. He took a deep breath and managed to right himself, using the damp cinder-block wall to steady himself as he made his way toward the room at the end of the hall.

  The air grew heavier with the stench of mold and piss, and there was also a sound. He could not place it at first, but when he was finally able to discern the squeaks and growls of multiple rats, an image started to form inside his head.

  An image that became reality as he stepped into the large, underground storage room.

  The floor was a sea of writhing, furry bodies. Everywhere he looked there were rats, thousands of them, crawling atop one another, some lashing out with snarls and hisses, some busily grooming themselves as if wanting to impress a suitor, some just attempting to scurry from one area of the floor to another, others simply waiting for who knew what.

  Stearns was both disgusted and fascinated.

  “Is that you, Algernon?” a woman’s voice asked from somewhere in the room.

  “Daphene?” he called out, moving farther into the room, trying not to step on the living carpet at his feet.

  “I’m so glad you were able to come,” the woman said.

  And with those words, the rats seemed to part like the Red Sea before Moses, revealing a hunched figure sitting in a wheelchair at the far end of the space.

  Stearns had expected to see the same vivacious woman with whom he’d shared numerous sexual liaisons over the many years they had been alive, perhaps a bit older, given the time that had passed since last they’d seen each other, but still with the same hungry vitality for life she had always possessed.

  But the closer he got, the more disturbed he became.

  For sitting in the wheelchair was a swollen wreck of a woman, her obscenely fat body straining against the material of the drab, short-sleeved dress she wore. Her arms were pale and flabby, like unbaked dough; her legs were a mess of blue veins crisscrossing beneath mottled, ulcerated skin. Her slippers were split at the sides, unable to contain the flesh of her puffy feet.

  “Have I changed that much, my love?” she asked in a wheezy, congested voice.

  And to think she once made her fortune in fashion design.

  Stearns was repulsed by what he saw. He stared at her bloated face, looking for some trace of the woman he had once lusted after hiding beneath layers of pale, sickly flesh.

  “It has been too long, darling,” he finally said, watching as the rats crawled upon her chair and her person. She stroked them lovingly as they came within reach, and then he saw the oddest thing. As Daphene laid her hands upon them, the rodents became suddenly still, falling limply onto their sides.

  “Even though we’ve been given more life than the average person, time still marches on at an alarming clip,” Daphene answered, brushing still bodies of rats from her expansive lap.

  “And what have you been doing with that additional life?” Stearns asked, fighting to hide his revulsion.

  “What haven’t I done?” she exclaimed with a laugh, causing her ample flesh to undulate. “I made the world my lover… I had whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. It was good for a time,” she said, gazing off into the distance. “Quite good. But then it all went wrong when the dreams started.”

  She turned her glassy-eyed stare to Stearns.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about, Algernon?”

  He knew exactly what she meant: the memories of all those killed in Hiroshima coming to him when his mind was at rest, desperate to be claimed as his own. “The dreams,” he said, reaching down to swat a rat beginning its ascent up his trouser leg. “They can be quite…overpowering at times.”

  “Yes,” Daphene agreed. “They can be, but once I adjusted to them…the hunger came.”

  Just the mention of the word made every muscle in Stearns’ body contract painfully. He hid his body’s response with a casual cough.

  “At first I had no idea what was happening, but then I realized that Deacon’s experiment that night had changed me. I hungered for the energies of living things.”

  She continued to stare at him, petting rats two at a time, draining their life forces before moving on to the next.

  Insatiable.

  He could have sworn she was growing larger before his eyes.

  “Which explains your little friends,” Stearns said, still in awe of the multitude of vermin that surrounded them.

  “They breed very quickly, and are quite nutritious as far as life energies go,” she explained. “They’re also very easily manipulated with magick.”

  The rats were climbing up, then dropping off, her body in droves now, their conversation obviously making her anxious-and hungry.

  “What about you, Algernon?”

  Stearns stared at her, pretending he didn’t know what she was getting at.

  “Were you changed, too?” she asked, a trace of desperation in her voice.

  Stearns finally nodded. “Yes, Daphene. Deacon’s damnable contraption changed all of us.”

  She picked up a squirming rat and squeezed the life from it like the juice from a lemon.

  “Have you talked with the others?” she asked.

  He nodded and began to shuffle closer to the wheelchair, the rats at his feet shrieking with protest as he stepped on their tails.

  “Robert and Eugene, yes. I tried to find Angus, but have had little success. You were quite difficult, too, but then you found me.”

  He was standing behind her now. He took a deep breath, then placed his hands on her shoulders, gently massaging the soft, pliant flesh beneath the cotton dress. It felt disgusting, but it was necessary.

  Daphene had stopped feeding.

  “How long was it after you spoke to Eugene and Robert that they…they…?” She had problems with the next word.

  “That they died?” Stearns asked, kneading the flesh of her shoulders, barely able to feel the tender muscle beneath the layers of fat. “Let’s not mince words, my dear. They we
re murdered.”

  The rats suddenly became more agitated, snapping, hissing and biting any other that was close by.

  “All right.” She swallowed noisily. “How long was it after you spoke to them that they were murdered?”

  “Actually, I spoke to them just before they died.” Stearns knew that he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. He leaned close to his former lover’s ear and whispered, “Right before I killed them.”

  The rats were going wild now, and Stearns actually felt a hint of tension through the flab. Daphene tried to turn her bulk in the chair, but he held her tightly, feeling the tiny mouths that had formed on the palms of his hands less than a year after being hooked up to Konrad Deacon’s machine eagerly opening and closing.

  “What are you doing?” Daphene screamed.

  “What I need to do.” He gripped her flesh all the tighter, allowing the mouths to take hold. “Nothing else was enough. It was like Chinese food; I’d always be hungry again in a matter of days.”

  “Algernon, please,” Daphene begged. She was struggling to wheel herself away. The rats that continued to climb upon her body were biting at each other as well as at her.

  Stearns held her fast, feasting on the unique life force of another cabal member.

  “And then I started to think about all my good friends and what we’d been through together, and I became soooooooooooo hungry.”

  Daphene thrashed but could not escape his grip as Stearns continued to feed, making his pain go away. Satisfying the hunger.

  “Something deep inside told me that my friends were the answer, that they would be the ones to save me…to feed me… And it was right.”

  He could feel the flesh beneath his hands starting to wither.

  The rats were in a panic as Daphene lost her grip on their tiny minds. They darted this way and that, frantic to flee the basement.

  His former lover no longer fought him. She leaned back in the wheelchair, her eyes now a milky white, looking up at him, begging him to stop before it was too late for her. But he would not. He had to take it all and leave nothing behind.

  The mouths on his hands eagerly sucked at the remaining life stuff, hungrily taking in energy. She would be dead soon; he could feel its approach.

  The cherry atop the sundae.

  As her life ended, he saw her memories, staccato flashes of a life of privilege, magick, and decadence. A life leading to this one spectacular moment when it would all be given up.

  For him.

  And then it was over. That last bit of delicious life clinging to the shriveled carcass in his hands broke free of its mooring and flowed into the mouths of his hands and into his newly enlivened form.

  Stearns shuddered with obscene pleasure, tossing his head back as he experienced the sensations of his revitalized body. It was like that morning in the Catskills all over again, when hundreds of thousands of people died to give him life.

  To make him strong.

  He released Daphene’s decaying remains, wisps of lingering life force, like smoke, trailing from her body to the sucking mouths still visible on his hands. The corpse pitched forward, tumbling from the chair to land upon the multitude of dead rats she had drained for sustenance.

  His entire body hummed with life-with power. He looked at his hands, watching as the writhing mouths receded back into his flesh. Then he moved swiftly through the shadows and out of the building.

  There was only one member of the cabal remaining, but Stearns had already set plans in motion for the future. Plans that, if carried out precisely, would sustain him long after the final cabalist had withered beneath his hands.

  It was a changing world, and Algernon Stearns was starving to be part of it.

  Remy returned to his room at the farthest end of the motor lodge with the clay skull beneath his arm, wrapped in his jacket.

  He was just about to slip the key attached to a green plastic pine tree into the lock when he sensed it.

  Danger.

  He hesitated a moment. He was still weak from his encounter at the farm. But, then, even though every preternatural sense screamed in warning, he unlocked and pushed open the door.

  A serious sense of menace rolled from the room like a thick fog as he stood in the doorway. The shades were drawn, but his eyes quickly scanned the dimness, searching for the cause of his overwhelming unease. His gaze fell on a shadowy shape sitting in the chair wedged into the corner of the room beside a floor lamp, and watched as the figure reached up to switch on the light, expelling the unknown.

  “What took you?” Francis asked. “I almost dozed off.”

  Remy forced himself to calm down, even though his senses continued to warn him of danger. He found that odd, for he and the former Guardian angel had been friends for quite a long time. He wondered if it had something to do with the fallen angel’s stay in the Hell dimension known as Tartarus. Something had happened to Francis there. Something he had not yet shared with Remy.

  “You got here fast,” Remy said, closing the door behind him. “I appreciate it.” He set his jacket-wrapped bundle on the end of the bed and sat down across from his friend.

  “What’s the story?” Francis asked, casually crossing his legs.

  The former Guardian angel and part-time assassin was dressed in his usual attire: two-piece suit, dark socks, dress shoes. He looked more like a certified public accountant than a fallen angel of Heaven serving out his sentence on Earth. Francis knew he had made the wrong decision when he chose the Morningstar over God, and had begged for forgiveness from the Almighty. For penance, he wound up as a guard at one of the passages between the hellish Tartarus and Earth.

  A job that had come to an end with the return of Lucifer Morningstar.

  “Somebody’s taken Ashley,” Remy blurted out, the words stirring the destructive power of Heaven that churned inside him, still waiting for its opportunity.

  Francis said nothing, which surprised Remy, but he continued anyway.

  “I wasn’t sure at first if it had anything to do with me, but-”

  “But it does,” Francis interrupted without emotion. He reached into his suit-coat pocket and removed a pack of cigarettes, tapped it against the side of his hand, and slid one from the package.

  “Yeah, it does,” Remy admitted, the very words painful.

  “Any idea who’s responsible?” Francis put the pack away and lit the smoke with a metal lighter that he took from another pocket of his suit coat.

  “I’ve talked to the guy. He called me with Ashley’s cell phone, but I haven’t a clue as to who he is. Seems to have a hard-on with the notion that I’m an angel.”

  Francis puffed on his smoke.

  “And how does he know that?”

  Remy shrugged. “Maybe from Ashley.”

  “But she doesn’t know, unless…”

  “No, I haven’t told her,” Remy said quickly, starting to think.

  “Never can tell,” Francis said. “Every now and then, you seem to get the urge to unburden yourself.”

  Remy wasn’t listening to Francis’ jab; instead he was focusing on the mysterious voice at the other end of his cell phone. He had specifically said that Ashley had told him, but if Ashley didn’t know, then how…

  And then he remembered the creature at the farmhouse, seemingly struggling with memories that did not belong to it. Could one of these creatures have taken some of Ashley’s life force, and, in doing so, somehow figured out what Remy was?

  There was still so much that he didn’t know, and it made his Seraphim nature want to destroy something. But Remy managed to keep a level head, which reminded him…

  He turned on the bed and grabbed the object wrapped in his coat.

  “The last time the guy called, he told me go out to an abandoned farm for a meeting,” Remy said as he carefully unwrapped the clay skull.

  “What’ve you got there?” Francis finished his smoke, and, not finding an ashtray, pinched the tip and dropped the remains on the carpeted floor.


  “I was attacked by these artificial beings,” Remy explained as he showed the skull to his friend. “They appeared to be human, but when they got their hands on me, they began to siphon off my life energies.”

  “And this head belongs to one of them?”

  “Yeah. Most of them left after nearly draining me dry. This one stayed behind to finish me off.”

  “So you were set up,” Francis commented, taking the skull from Remy for a closer look.

  “Looks like it.”

  “So how do you know that Ashley is still alive?”

  “Don’t even think that,” Remy snapped.

  “I know it’s tough to hear, but you’ve got to think of this from all the angles. If one of this guy’s creature flunkies tried to kill you-or drain you dry, or whatever the fuck it was doing-then your contact could already have gotten rid of her.”

  “No. He wants something from me,” Remy said firmly.

  “Then why try to off you?”

  “I don’t get it, either. But there was something he said in our last conversation about needing to know that I was actually what he thought I was. Why the need to verify if he just wanted me dead?”

  Francis was still holding the skull, but stared at Remy. “You know you’re clutching at straws.”

  “It’s all I’ve got right now, which is why I gave you a call. Any idea what that thing is?” Remy nodded toward the skull.

  “Some kind of artificial life-form-a homunculus or golem-likely created by a pretty powerful magick user, but that’s all I’ve got to contribute.” Francis hefted the skull. “What the fuck is it made out of, anyway?”

  “I think it’s clay.”

  “Wonder if it has a brain, or something that functions like one,” Francis mused.

  “I have no idea,” Remy answered. “Why would you…”

  Francis reached into his jacket pocket to remove what looked to be a glowing scalpel, its blade seemingly made from light.

  “Did you get that from…,” Remy began.

  “Yeah, took it from Malachi,” Francis said casually. “Right after I put a bullet in his head.”

  Malachi had been one of the first angels created by the Lord God and had helped the Creator design many of the forms of life that had first appeared on the earth. The blade was his most prized tool.