Blood & Rust Read online

  “I don’t have a hell of a lot more—”

  “Tell me everything you know. I need to get it straight in my head. You have no idea how scrambled my mind is.”

  “Maybe I do....” He looked at me, and our eyes locked briefly. “Maybe I don’t.” He gave me a funny look then he shrugged. “Okay, everything I know about the guy. He showed up about five years ago, hanging around the neo-pagan scene here. He’d just show up at their rituals, circles, whatever you call them. Everyone describes him as tall, bearded, English accent. None of the pagans I talked to liked the guy. He gave everyone the willies—bad karma, smelly aura, or something. Half the people I talked to described him as predatory.”

  “Childe a real name or an alias?” I asked.

  Bowie looked at me as if I should have known that. I probably should’ve. But I was long past my limit as far as feigning an intact cerebellum was concerned.

  “Almost certainly an alias,” he stared at me. “The pagan crowd has a thing for renaming themselves. Not that this guy was ever part of the pagan crowd.”

  I stared back. “Not part of the crowd?” I thought of my errant fortune-teller.

  “No. The pagans are a good crowd, throw good parties. Childe wasn’t there for the parties.”

  “What was he there for?” I was getting an odd feeling about the conversation I was having with Bowie. Something was happening.

  “He was a predator.” Bowie had nearly ceased moving, and a lot of the inflection had gone out of his voice. Looking into his eyes, I could see his pupils dilated nearly all the way. If I hadn’t been watching him all this time, I could have sworn he had just taken some heavy drug.

  “Predator?” I asked.

  “It took a long time for them to notice what Childe was doing. See, they had open rituals, circles, whatnot, where anyone could come and see what they were doing. Childe would pick people, the curiosity seekers. Never one of the regulars, the serious pagans.”

  “Young teenagers, usually girls?”

  “Yes. But boys, too. Anyone who left with Childe never returned to any of the public gatherings. Since these were always strangers to the pagans, it took them a long time to notice.”

  “But they did notice.” I had the eerie feeling of knowing everything Bowie was telling me, and the associations weren’t pleasant.

  “They barred him from their functions—and he disappeared, along with a large number of confused teenagers.”

  I rubbed my knees and noticed Bowie imitating my motion. He blinked when I blinked. We were breathing in sync. I had to repress an urge to shudder.

  What was happening?

  “This is where I came in, isn’t it?”

  “You were looking for this girl, Cecilia. Childe is still the last person to be seen with her, until you made the tape.”

  “What tape?”

  “The tape you made of the sacrifice—”

  Memory slammed into me. A real memory, as unexpected and violent as a sledge to the back of my skull.

  I stand behind a screen of leafless scrub, calf-deep in frozen mud. Ice cuts into the upper parts of my calves. The night is clear, the air sharp, the moon full. I’m facing a wide clearing, a flat spot bordered by steep, snow-dusted hillsides.

  Facing me, a hundred yards away or more, is a flood-control dam, an angled wall of concrete sloping up about a hundred feet into the dark. The runoff forms a creek snaking the left side of the clearing. I’m hidden along the shores of that outflow.

  I’m aiming my camcorder at the right side of the clearing, toward a smaller hill nestling by the right corner of the dam. There are structures built into the hill—

  That’s not what I’m looking at. My camcorder has drifted away from my eye, so there is nothing left between me and what I am looking at.

  Between me and the small hill is a semicircle of a dozen people. They stand in a patch of snow darkened far beyond the depths of their bluish shadows. The snow they stand in is black.

  The blackness smears what portions of their skin I can see. It dots their jackets, their hair, their jeans. The blackness almost completely obliterates the crumpled form they surround, making it no more than a lump in the shadow.

  What they surround used to be human. The spreading blackness is its blood.

  One of the circle looks directly at me. The blood carves a black hollow in his face. He smiles and I cannot see his teeth for the shadow.

  I jerked out of the involuntary memory as if an icicle had been shoved into my aorta. The image came with a legion of emotions: disgust, fear, and—it turned my stomach to think of it—something akin to lust. I sat there, shaking, staring into Bowie’s dilated impassive eyes, and decided that I must really be insane.

  I ran from that scene, I know I ran from it.

  But he had seen me—

  “What am I involved in?” I said. My voice was barely a whisper.

  “Something you don’t understand. Even the Le Vey Satanists shy away from these Childe people.”

  Looking at Bowie scared me. It was almost as if he had become some sort of automaton. It was hard to tell if I was really talking to Bowie, someone who knew me, or if I was talking to some warped part of my own mind. The sense of knowing what he was about to say just before he said it didn’t help.

  It began to sink in that these people had slaughtered Kate to warn me away. The sick, feverish feeling overcame me again, and I blacked out for a moment.

  The next thing I knew was I’d broken eye contact with Bowie, and I was trying to throw up again. I was on my knees on the floor, my stomach trying to slam through my diaphragm, and nothing coming up but a few bits of sour blackness.

  “God, you all right?” Bowie’s voice sounded normal again. I barely noticed.

  He dragged me toward the bathroom. I didn’t fight him. As he led me, one bony arm around my waist, he kept talking. “It’ll be all right. We’re going to get you to that doctor.”

  The door opened to the bathroom, and suddenly I was faced with a mirror and searing pain. “Lights!” I managed to croak.

  Bowie understood me, and hit the light switch, breaking the molten eye contact I had with myself. I turned away from the medicine cabinet and sat on the lid of the john. I waved him away.

  His silhouette hovered in the doorway for a moment and he asked, “Are you going to be all right?”

  No...

  “Yes.”

  He closed the door to the windowless bathroom, leaving me in near-perfect darkness. The only light came from the cracks around the door, filtered through the edge of the hall carpet. It was a dusty, anemic light that carved a thin strip of visibility across the walls.

  I was no longer retching, but I felt empty, violated. I felt as if something had been cored out of my being, leaving me with just the husk. I fingered the ring on my finger.

  My wife. My daughter. And I couldn’t remember....

  7

  It took me some time before I had gathered the strength to turn on the light. I was careful to keep my back to the mirror until I had replaced my sunglasses. Even with my eyes covered, I winced when I saw my reflection—not from pain, but from the ravages written on my face.

  I wasn’t looking at the same person who had stepped out of the bathroom of the Woodstar Motel. My face was lined and hollow-looking, worse even than the pale shadowed mask I had seen in the Arabica. My skin wasn’t just pale now. It was translucent. The bare bulb above the mirror carved the outline of a skull on my face.

  Four hours ago, in the bathroom of the motel, I had looked perfectly fine. An hour ago, maybe less, I had looked in the mirror at the Arabica and saw someone who was ill.

  Here I looked like death.

  I reached up and touched my cheekbone, under the edge of my sunglasses. My skin felt dry, thin, and cold. As I drew my finger down my face, it left a streak of gray compressed skin behind it. I stared at that strip for a full minute before it returned to the anemic color of the surrounding skin.

  Death was a kind wo
rd for what I saw in the mirror.

  My hands shook, and it began to dawn on me exactly how loose my clothes felt. My jeans were hanging on my hips, the denim jacket I still wore felt like a tent on me, even my holster felt loose. It felt as if I’d lost twenty pounds since the motel room.

  I raised my arm so the sleeve fell away from my watch. The watchband—which was snug when I’d donned the watch—was loose on a wrist much bonier than I remembered.

  “No way,” I whispered. This was an impossibility.

  I looked at my hands and saw that my nails had lengthened, just like they were supposed to on a corpse.

  I backed away from the mirror and grabbed for the door. My heart felt frozen in my chest. I couldn’t sense it beating. And, like during my journey through the storm sewer, every breath I took was a conscious act.

  I stepped through the door and into a dim hallway. I took a few steps and leaned on the wall where I could see into the living room. Bowie was there, in a corner, talking on the phone. “Yeah. He’s here, locked in the bathroom.... Yes, urgent, he looks like shit ... what? I don’t think he’s fed at all. Just look at him....”

  Hearing him tore at the inside of my head. I wasn’t thinking quite right. Whatever help Bowie and his friend were offering, a torn part of my mind was telling me that I was beyond medical attention. Could some doctor who was used to dealing with junkies and overdoses do anything for someone who was turning into a walking corpse?

  “Look, just get over here. We’ll worry about that when we get him straightened out.... Dangerous? ... When was the last time you were as strung out as he is?”

  I was suddenly very afraid of doctors, and what they might find. I needed desperately to get away from Bowie, to get away from the help he was offering. I edged along the wall of the hallway, toward the entranceway, senselessly afraid that Bowie would turn around and see me.

  “Yes, that would be easier.... If you want me to I will. But all this we’ve gone through was to avoid that.... You know what I mean....”

  Somehow I inched all the way to the door. I watched Bowie, and I was frozen for a moment when I saw my reflection in the night-black windows behind the couch. Bowie faced away from me, staring out the glass at the storm.

  Either it was the angle, or something he was watching outside, but he didn’t notice me. “You didn’t tell anyone about him, did you? ... No, I just noticed this guy standing outsi—”

  I stumbled out of the apartment, closing the door on Bowie’s conversation.

  Even with the sunglasses, the lights in the hallway hurt my eyes. I sagged against a wall, the light a weight on my shoulders. The hall was hot with a heat that didn’t reach beneath my bone-dry skin. Cold was deep in the core of my body, as if my chest was packed with snow.

  I shook my head and forced myself to walk. I needed to get away. My body was screaming its need at me, and it was a call that was impossible to ignore now.

  My eyes refused to focus on the hall ahead of me. My gaze darted to shadowy corners, where the painful light didn’t reach. In the darkest corners, the ones of impenetrable black, I could imagine something glistening and wet.

  The wall abraded my shoulder like sandpaper, even through the denim, and the sound was like tearing canvas. Snow rattled the windows in the stairwell, like an unwanted visitor scratching to gain entry....

  “‘Tis the wind and nothing more,’ ” I muttered. I almost laughed. I could feel an inappropriate glee surge like a tide, an alien desire to shout the lines from Poe’s poem—

  “Nevermore,” I choked out, grabbing the railing for balance. I was losing it. My mind was as erratic as the snowstorm, feverish neurons firing at random. My grip on the banister was crushing the skin on my hands.

  I stared down the center of the stairwell, all four floors to the ground. The sunglasses slipped off my face and tumbled slowly to the concrete below. They broke when they hit, the lenses fragmenting into a dozen pieces of glittering plastic.

  I let go of the railing and jerked back as if I’d been hit. My back slammed into the wall behind me. I heard the plaster crack.

  I’d been going up the stairs.

  I looked up the stairs, where I’d been going, deliriously. Now, listening, I could hear it. The argument upstairs—one I had heard upon arriving here—was continuing, or had renewed itself.

  I could just see the door of the apartment up at the next landing. Number 401. The door seemed to swell in my vision. Even with my back to the wall, I was still inching toward it. I could feel it from where I was, a half-Sight down. It felt as if it was the open door of a blast furnace. Not heat. Anger. Fear.

  “You don’t play me like that, bitch!”

  I could make out the voices now, like a tiny river of lucidity in a feverish desert.

  “Please, Tony—” Woman’s voice cut short by an impact and the sound of something breaking.

  I stood in front of door 401. It was razor sharp in my vision, everything else had blurred away. The entire apartment building melted away, everything but the door.

  “You think I’m stupid?” Tony was shouting through the door. “You think I ain’t got eyes?”

  “Please—” a timid, frightened voice, nearly inaudible.

  “Do you?”

  I tried the doorknob.

  “I’m going to kill you if you don’t tell me who the fuck he is.”

  I was breathing again, sucking in hot coppery air. Something in that air shriveled my gut into a hard little knot. The door was locked, but that barely mattered to me. My body was an automaton.

  I heard a sound behind the door, a strangled gurgle.

  My shoulder slammed into the door. It hit hard enough to break bone. It was the doorjamb that broke. Wood splintered, and the door jerked as the security chain caught it. The chain barely held a fraction of a second—

  Then it gave.

  I stumbled into the living room. The door crashed into the wall, cracking plaster, and slowly swung back shut.

  The room was a mess. Chairs were overturned, a glass coffee table was smashed, blinds had been ripped from the windows, and there was a hole in the drywall where someone had thrown a telephone through.

  The only light was from a floor lamp in front of me. Sprawled on the ground, its shade askew, it cast crazy ink-black shadows on the walls.

  “What the fuck?” Tony was shirtless, wearing only a pair of dirty blue jeans. His girlfriend was naked, and only supported by his hand in her hair. There were bruises across her back, and she was bleeding badly from a broken nose.

  Badly.

  The smell of blood was rank in the room. I sucked in the smell, and the colors in the room seemed to get deeper, the light brighter.

  “This ain’t your business, scarecrow. You better leave or I’ll have to fuck you up.” His hand left the woman’s hair, and she slid to the ground, unmoving.

  Her bruises shone like crimson flares, her blood was like a river of fire, but where her blood splattered Tony it was like a black taint of leprosy.

  Tony stood before me, muscles flexing in a display of intimidation. “You deaf, motherfucker?”

  None of this meant much to me at this point. I was quite mad. I was in free fall. The only thing that anchored me to earth was the magnificent flare of emotion standing before me. Looking at Tony right then was like looking at the sun.

  And I was cold inside.

  “What you staring at?” Tony took another step toward me. His face was reddening, a tide of blood washing over his expression. “You been fucking with my woman?”

  It began as an angry shout, but it trailed off as I drew the Eagle from its holster.

  “Hey, man, don’t do something stupid—”

  I leveled the gun at Tony’s head. “Once upon a midnight dreary—” The poem came unbidden to my lips, some mad urge to taunt the last shred of my sanity.

  I was halfway into the stanza when Tony said, “What the fuck are you—”

  I whipped him across the face with the overlong
barrel of the automatic. His face snapped to the side, his mouth sprayed blood, and he almost fell to his knees. Almost, but not quite. Tony was a strong kid. Strong, and so full of anger that standing in front of him was like standing in front of a bonfire.

  His shocked eyes stared into my own, blood streaming down his face. I could tell his blood from hers. His blood burned my eyes with its inner life, while the places where her blood had touched him were dead, dormant, and black.

  The shock in his eyes slowly drained away as he looked at me. I whispered, “‘Tis some visiter,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door / Only this and nothing more.’ ”

  Where the woman’s blood had been rivers of fire, the blood on Tony’s slackening face was the mouth of an open volcano. Heat, where I was so, so cold inside.

  I took a step forward, still quoting, whispering, staring at the transfixed Tony. I lowered the gun because Tony was no longer moving. I was close enough to feel his breath on my face. The only thing separating the two of us was the lamp, a narrow rod on the floor.

  Upthrust shadows crossed his face, devouring his eyes, leaving empty wells to stare at me.

  “Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, / By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.”

  I remembered the sacrifice, the memory of a gore-stained face, smiling. Tony’s mouth was like that now, blood-covered and black with shadow.

  “‘Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,’ I said, ‘are sure no craven, / Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—”

  I could feel the same bizarre lust I’d felt during that memory. It struck me full force in the chest, and the groin, an aching hunger that had drawn me to this room even in my delirium. I dropped the gun.

  “‘Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!’ ”

  I raised my arms to embrace Tony. He didn’t move.

  “Quoth the Raven,”

  I stepped on the lightbulb. It popped, plunging the room into darkness.

  “‘Nevermore,’ ” I whispered.