Decatur (39 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Tower

When they came into the white ceramic tiled kitchen of the mansion, there was a resounding crash. Startled, Gar looked to Marilyn who whispered, “It’s haunted” and twisted the brass knob of the door to the servant’s stairway, pushing the old button for the single lights hung at every floor to illuminate their way. It was like she had never left.

But as they began to climb the steep dark stairway with the rough mudded walls,
this place, this place
, where she had first understood who she was and had learned that she had to hide it to survive, was like sucking on a gas pipe to Marilyn, she thought she might just die then. It all seemed impossible again, how would she ever succeed against Gar and J. J.? She fell against the rough walls and let the tears come down her cheeks. Gar bent over her suddenly, fingering her cheek, brushing away her tears like she was five.

“I feel the same way, Marilyn,” he said, his own voice wracked with emotion.

Marilyn looked up then, her dark lashes crescents around her drowning eyes. “You do?” she said and he nodded. “It seems so steep,” she said in a little girl voice like she was remembering when she had first climbed these stairs.

“Climb on papa’s back. I’ll be your horse,” he said in a choked voice but managing a goofy smile: anything to make her stop crying at that moment. He crouched down.

“Oh no, I couldn’t, it’s too sharp a climb,” she protested, looking sweeter than she ever had before.
If she could exhaust him she might have a prayer
.
If her friends could get to the tower in time. If, if, if…

“My lady, let me serve you,” he said and she climbed up on his back. Her legs wrapped around his torso and she flung her arms around his neck as he began to run, feeling her in every nerve of his body, not minding that this was using all of his reserves.

He was about to get replenished.

Rowley charged into the front hallway, sniffing the air for any sign of Marilyn. Max was right behind, the gun secure in his hand. Weston had cut through the kitchen to take the backstairs, the plan being they would approach the tower from both sides.

It was then that all the dining room chairs, heavy carved mahogany thrones from Spain, fell back away from the big table, causing Rowley to whelp and jump in fear. A freezing draft came out of the room at them.

Gretch, panting a little, came into the entrance parlor, “Looks like Kiki’s home,” she said, sitting down on the velvet round ottoman and beginning to undo her brace. “Damn leg. Go on without me” she gestured to the big staircase going up to the left, with its heavy oriental runner, chandelier and big arched window on the landing. Max looked at her a little surprised but glad in a way that she wasn’t insisting on coming,
she would slow them down. He had to get up there now.

Not waiting, he took the grand staircase at a run, calling for Rowley, “Come on boy, let’s go get Marilyn.”

Petey leaned his forehead against the iron bar for just a second, just a half of a second, he pleaded in his mind. Then to his own horror his hand began again, the woven whip clutched in his palm, he lifted it up and let it down again and again against his own thighs, his jeans ripped and torn now, blood seeping through. The jagged white lines wavered below. The mirror reflected him as a pitiful sight in shredded clothes hanging in an iron cage with a sheet wadded up nearby and the old man in a camel suit laughing, laughing, saying, “Bet you think twice now about what you did, forging that permission slip. When J. J.’s through you’ll never give yourself permission to do anything again. But what the hell, just for old times sake I may suck your soul out myself, like marrow from a bone.”

Father Weston cautiously opened the back door and let himself into the large kitchen with its marble counter tops and white tiles on the walls and floors, feeling like a hollow shell of himself. He had just used the old tricks, the Catholic priest tricks to get some kids out of danger, true, but it was all false. He was an agent of an organization that professed a lot of things, faith, piety, compassion, when it was mostly about keeping authority and power, facilitating any connection to the Divine was decidedly beside the point. Now, when he needed to tap into some real spiritual power, he felt utterly bankrupt. Still, he couldn’t let Marilyn face Gar alone even though he had nothing with which to fight an animphage: a crucifix and holy shaker just didn’t count, he thought, as he spied the door to the back stairs open and, listening, could hear the pounding of feet

They were in the linen closet with its door that led into the turret, and just as it had so many years ago, the little key hung from hook. Marilyn bit her lip and let herself slide off Gar’s back, fighting the claustrophobia and panic that the closet, with its blood stained dirty sheets now yellowed with age, gave her.

Gar leaned over his knees for a minute after she was down, trying to catch his breath. “Where are we now, my lady?” he asked as the closet pulsed before his eyes. His heart was hammering, he shouldn’t have tried to run carrying her,
it was too much and now they were at a dead-end, a closet with two doors, no celebrant in sight.

“Give me a sip, papa needs it.” Gar looked at the amphora clutched in Marilyn’s hand: if he could just have a sip he’d be all right.

Marilyn shook her head. “I can’t, he’s through there, the one who made you, and he wants this back. It’s time,” she whispered, taking the key from the hook, willing her hands not to shake.

Gar let his eyes close for just a moment to gather himself; flashing back on the temple of the Castello, not wanting to remember how it had felt to have his own soul taken, knowing in every fiber of his being that his master was a frightening being that had to be obeyed. ‘
Join the hunt’ It had been so long and now the long journey was over; he would take Marilyn’s essence into his own and, transformed, she would join him.

J. J. saw the closet door knob turning and smiled. Despite the fact he had gone through two renewals, graduating from merely inhaling souls to being able to cast himself into others, he was still limited. Mentally he was nearly unstoppable, but physically only the lowest or most damaged beings would fully accept him. He couldn’t wait, he was sick of J. J.’s mortal body. Now the elements had come together, Gar ready to take the soul he had been so long in the hunt for, the amphora returned, it was finally time for the third renewal. He had carefully plotted his way to this place but along the way allowed for some inspired improvisation like a marvelous dance. Soon the blood and flesh of his long-lived mortality with all its hungers and fluids, mess and vulnerabilities would be gone. He would be as the wind, move like a tornado, his very own cosmic storm. Just as Gar’s renewal would make him an even stronger Destroyer, with the Instrument turned, the demon inside J. J. would at last be one with the Infernity, on the cusp of a millennium become a phage of the lux, “the light everlasting” no more.

Marilyn twisted the closet knob but, feeling protective, Gar pushed through; wanting to make sure he was between her and the one who had made him. The door opened and there was the being, in one corner in a Western suit and hat, but it was the same, the celebrant, wearing a jagged grin like his face had been slashed.

Max whispered to Rowley as they were nearly to the top of the staircase, the third flight narrower with the tower room’s carved black mahogany door directly ahead, “No barking, we don’t want to warn them,” He had the gun out; he knew once they opened the door it was no holds barred.

Rowley knew it too and was ready. He thought of Marilyn’s scent, of the way the sofa felt under him at home, and then he let that fall off him and willed all his being into the fang and blood instinct.