Dead Souls (26 page)

Benjamin sidestepped the oncoming boy. He jerked his fist out and grabbed David by the hair, then, holding the screwdriver to his neck, dragged him back toward the woods—here Benjamin's rootless thoughts sketched the crazy cartoon image of a prehistoric man lugging his female mate back into their cave. He stopped by an old oak tree and lifted the boy to eye-level, keeping the flat of the blade against his chin. He gazed into the boy's gored face, sniggered once at what he saw, thinking crazily
like mother, like son
, then with one arm, duly slammed his skull against the rock-solid tree trunk. The sound was shocking: a hard unyielding thud of bone on wood. There was an odd hissing sound, David's lungs releasing their air. Benjamin let go. David fell face down to the ground like a wind-torn branch, leaving behind a jagged smatter of blood on the tree's bark.

Benjamin backed away, watching with amazement as David writhed on the ground like a snake, sneakers digging irregular trenches in the mud, arms pumping crazily, as though still determined to fight. In a miraculous display, he flipped over and used his one good eye to peer up at Benjamin; his gored eye draped lifelessly across his temple, supported by a stringy network of muscles and veins. His mouth opened. A thin line of blood trickled out across his cheek. He said, "
Ahg
," then, fell silent, his untouched eye rolling up into its socket.

Heart pumping furiously, Benjamin backed away from his bloody creation: yet another feat of rabid determination to admire. At this moment he realized that no one and nothing could stop him from completing the ritual. He backed up, hit into the car, jolted, then turned around with the screwdriver held out in front of him. He glimpsed the stiff body of Helen Mackey's husband in the front seat. The bullet hole in the man's head stared back at Benjamin like an accusing black eye.

Ever so slightly, it twitched.

Benjamin drew back. With his free hand, he rubbed the fatigue from his eyes.
That didn't happen
, he thought incoherently.
It's my imagination, my damned tired mind dealing with shock.

But when he opened his eyes, blinked, then stared back at that terrible black hole in the man's head, he saw that it was indeed moving, like tiny puckering lips on a fish. Benjamin felt no choice but to credit what he saw as real, and came to assume that from somewhere beyond this plane of existence, something wholly spiritual was trying to touch him, trying to make certain that he retained an awareness of its presence—a presence alerting him to make preparations for its physical arrival.

Osiris…

Black oily blood spurted from the bullet hole as if a vein had been slashed. It splashed across the dashboard of the car, then gushed out down the man's face, onto his soiled shirt, soaking in and spreading out in a reaching puddle.

Revolted and confused, Benjamin released a choking gasp. He shoved himself away from the car, feet splashing in a muddy puddle. He nearly slipped down, but managed to keep his balance, eyes still fixed on the bullet hole, now oozing a spiral of wet brain-matter like soft-serve ice cream.

"Oh God!" Benjamin cried in a stifled voice, feeling out of control and even frightened. The exuding slab of brain curled across the man's face like a horn, wriggling as though it had a life of its own. As Benjamin gathered his breath to scream, the bullet hole snapped shut and cut off the secreting swell. It plunked down in the man's lap, where it writhed like a worm out of earth.

Benjamin turned his gaze away. Shudders wrenched their way up and down his spine. He squeezed his eyes shut and stared into the swirling blackness, begging for the strength to continue. He smelled the rise of something rotten—of decaying leaves and sitting water. Another sharp pain filled his head, like a nail lancing into the nape of his neck. It dulled all his senses, and when he opened his eyes, he saw sepia-toned clouds floating across the late-afternoon sky.

Benjamin Conroy
, mewled a voice inside his head, cold and bonelike.
 

And when Benjamin laid eyes on the dead man again, he saw that there was now no oozing brain-worm. And no blood. Just a clotted hollow bullet hole in the center of his pasty forehead.

The ritual...

Heeding the voice in his head, Benjamin staggered away. With it came horrific pain, sudden and sharp against his skull, seeming to echo the throbs emerging from his stab wounds. He spun left and right, holding the screwdriver out, swinging it through the air as he shambled around the back of the car. Drifting in and out of reality, he circumvented the church, kicking up small mounds of soil with the toes of his shoes. Out front, in the dirt parking lot, sat his truck, dull beneath the clouded sky. Benjamin raced toward it, realizing only after jerking open the driver's side door that he didn't have the keys, that he'd dropped them on the floor upon first sighting Helen Mackey sitting behind his desk.

He slammed a fist against the door. "Damn it to Christ! Damn! Damn! Damn!" Bathed in sweat and blood and waves thick with dizziness and madness, he reeled back toward the church, pressing a hand against his chest wound. Blood seeped sluggishly between his fingers. As he approached the front doors, a sudden, strange weight bore down on him, making him feel as though he were trapped in some crazy nightmare. His muscles felt numb, his entire body moving with uncontrollable lethargy, seemingly unable to flee the horror nipping at his heels.

He climbed the steps and staggered inside, the blood and mud on his chest feeling icy cold upon his skin. His footsteps echoed throughout the church as he stumbled down the aisle. He traipsed up onto the altar, fell, then crawled awkwardly toward the open office door.

The keys were on the floor where he'd dropped them, sitting amidst the mess of photos that had fallen from his diary. The injured eyes of the women in the
Polaroids
stared up at him, having once pleaded for God's forgiveness, now accusing him of their lifelong woes. A series of sharp pains stabbed at his brain, and he had to grip his skull tightly in a useless effort to ease them.

A voice whispered, "
The ritual…"

Only this time it hadn't come from his head. It had come from somewhere in the room, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that he couldn't have escaped the shocking truth of its source.

Helen Mackey.

So embroiled with his actions, he hadn't even considered the fact that her body was still in his office.
 
But there it was, there
she
was, lying spread-eagled on the floor with her dress hiked up around her pale thighs; her face, indescribably unrecognizable beneath the mass of gore he'd made of it, jaw hanging, dead lips split wide, smiling crimson-stained teeth.

Grabbing the keys, Benjamin crawled back against the doorjamb, staring incredulously at her, squeezing both the keys and the knife firmly. Her eyes suddenly came to life, rolling beneath her death-mask, wet and yellow and peering reproachfully at Benjamin. She spoke, her voice seeming to come from very far away:
"The ritual…"
. Her teeth and gums showed in a repulsive, leering grin.

"Osiris…" Benjamin said, his own voice sounding muffled, as though he were speaking into a vacuum. "Is it you?"

His question went unanswered. In a blink, Helen Mackey had returned to her old, dead milky self, unmoving and unspeaking, eyes clouded over, jaw slung in a lifeless gape.

Benjamin pulled himself up and staggered from the office. Agony ripped up from his wounds as he fled across the altar and down the center aisle.
I have to get out of here
, he thought, barely lucid.
I must complete the ritual now.

As he made his way outside, dizziness beset him. His feet tangled and he spilled down the wooden steps. Dropping the keys and the knife, he threw his hands out to absorb the shock, which traveled to his shoulders. He lay sprawled in the soil for a moment, breathing
raspily
, shivering coldly, realizing now that time was short, and that the ritual must be completed at once.

He stood, and retrieved the keys and the knife. He leaned up against the truck and looked back at the church. Its chipped surface was swelling, breathing as if it had retained a life of its own. Terrified, he turned away. He looked at the blood on his hands, his chest, his legs. Grayness overwhelmed him, and he had to grab the open door to keep from collapsing.

Suddenly, something brushed up against his ankle—like a cat endeavoring to relieve an itch. He jerked away from it, nearly fainting from the bullets of pain inside his head.

In the soil, next to his feet, was a dead bird, it feathers black and ragged, blanketing a withered skeleton. Maggots crawled in its eyes and on its head.

A voice from the unmoving bird whispered:
Go to the house…

Wheezing, he scrambled into the truck, shut the door, and locked it in a panic, noticing only as he backed away that the dead bird was now perched on the roof of the church, staring down at him.

September 8
^th
, 2005

12:09 PM

J
ohnny couldn't believe what he was seeing: a disfigured man—a baseball-sized portion of his forehead missing, his left eye little more than a dark empty void—repeatedly stabbing the gut of the man that brought him here.
   

Blood spurted out onto the floor. It spattered the disfigured man. It saturated the front of Judson's white dress shirt, who was caught in an appalling, seizure-like death grip, hands and feet tapping out discordant rhythms on the dirty wood floor.

Johnny tried to move but was paralyzed, his body and thoughts trapped in a sudden deep-freeze. The floor swayed and rolled beneath his feet. A thick, muted ringing filled in his ears.

The crazed man yanked the garden spade out, hesitated, then leaned back and carefully inspected his work. He cried hoarsely, "You are NOT his blood!"

He cocked his arm and drove the spade back into Judson's chest. A gargled moan escaped the lawyer's bleeding lips. The crazed man jerked the spade upwards, twisted it, and yanked it out. Judson's body bucked and thrashed, then fell motionless, arms and legs spread out in snow-angel form, a sickly wheeze blowing out from his lungs.

In silence, the murderer peered over at Johnny.

Gasping, Johnny sidestepped along the length of the wall and threw himself out of the room. His feet slid through the puddle by the steps. He lost his balance and thumped heavily to the moldy floor. A hard, burst of pain lanced up his spine, and in this moment he realized with horror that the one-eyed man who'd just murdered Andrew Judson was the same man whose picture he'd seen on the news this morning—the psycho escapee from the mental institution.

He scrambled to his knees, looked back over his shoulder. The psycho was perched in the doorway, staring at Johnny with his terrible, glowering eye. Johnny could see the spade in his hand, doused in blood, his hand equally coated and dripping. The black robe he wore hung open like a drape, exposing green institutional scrubs underneath, tattered and soiled with mud. His breathing, heavy and labored, whirred as though clogged with phlegm.

Johnny leapt to his feet and ran back through the house, feet pounding through the living room, the kitchen, then out the back door. Not once did he look back, brutal fear keeping his motive to escape this terror wholly focused. The psycho had looked possessed, set on a path of unimaginable purpose, his one eye wide and wild, lips cracked and coated with yellow mucous, hair raked with mud. Johnny stumbled across the porch. He lost his footing as he went down the steps. He reached out for the iron handrail, but couldn't manage a grip. With a yell he went sprawling into the knee-high grass. The tight swarm of horseflies he saw upon his arrival flew apart, their singular drone bursting into a chorus of disbanding tones.

A swaying shadow covered him, and when he looked up he saw the psycho standing on the top step of the porch, the dripping garden spade in his hand. Here in the sunlight, he looked even more crazed, his skin pocked and peppered with cuts, lips wide and brimming, a slick and slimy cold sore oozing at the corner of his mouth.

"
Conroy…"
he moaned disjointedly.

Johnny gained his feet and raced around the side of the house, the psycho's putrid stink washing over him as a warm breeze swept by. He cut to the right, sprinting across the weedy driveway to the driver's side of Judson's car. The psycho screamed, and Johnny could hear his approaching footsteps on the buried gravel of the driveway. Johnny yanked furiously on the door handle. It popped open, and he lunged inside, locking the doors a split moment before the psycho latched his bloody fingers onto the driver's side door handle.

The psycho pulled and pulled, grunting with each failed attempt. Unable to get in, he leapt on top of the hood and pressed his ragged face against the windshield.

Gasping, Johnny pressed back against the seat. He could hardly breathe in the oppressive heat of the car. His heart was a big bass drum in his chest. He groped at the ignition, already knowing that Judson had taken the keys with him.

Face still on the windshield, the psycho shrieked, then clawed at the glass, leaving behind squeaky finger paint-swirls of blood. "Conroy!" he snarled, spewing spittle. He slammed his fists against the windshield, the bloody spade still clenched in his right hand. Johnny flinched, shuddered, then clambered over into the backseat, watching with nightmare terror as the psycho leaped off the car and ran toward the house.