HELLz BELLz (24 page)

She looked into his glassy eyes. Her trigger finger seemed to twitch with each bong of the distant church bell as if it were tapping time to the bell’s steady rhythm. The bell wanted her to shoot him. It wanted him out of the way, too. The deformed man was interfering, breaking up the signals the bell was sending her. He could cause her to miss the coming revelation.

“Please,” he pleaded, “don’t…”

He looked so pitiful; she began to feel sorry for the nauseating man.

But then his glassy eyes glowed red in the streetlight.

“Demon,” she said, and shot him in the face.

He twisted away and fell through the door and onto the street. Sara stomped the gas and the car leapt forward, the passenger door slamming itself shut.

* * *

Woolrich was explaining that they weren’t breaking and entering because someone else had already broken into the shop. Suzie was stepping carefully over the broken glass, and Joe was staring into the splotchy red face of the young man pointing a rifle at him. A second rifleman stepped from the shop’s shadows; Joe had never seen him before, but the kid with the painted face was familiar.

“Mr. Carr?” Red Face said, surprised.

Then Joe recognized him: James Winter, a regular customer in Joe’s bookstore. “James?” he said. “What—”

“Do ’em, man,” said the other boy. Joe didn’t like the crazed expression he wore.

“What’s this?” Woolrich muttered when he saw the two armed youths.

“Shit,” said Suzie. “Now what?”

“Now you die, bitch,” said the crazed-faced boy as he aimed his weapon at Suzie.

“No, Josh,” James said, “wait.”

“We’re not the enemy, son,” Joe told Josh. “How about pointing that thing away?”

“How ’bout I bust a cap in yo ass, dog?” he said with a grinning leer. He jacked a round into the chamber.

“Josh, goddammit,
no.
” James used the barrel of his rifle to push Josh’s aim toward the floor and off Suzie.

“What the fuck, man?”

“I know him,” said James. “He’s…okay. The bookstore dude.”

“So what?”

James lowered his voice to a sharp whisper: “So we ain’t wasting ’em.”

Joe didn’t hesitate to press his advantage. He moved quickly, rushing Josh, grabbing his rifle and using it to shove the kid backward on his ass. Now he had the rifle in his hands and his opponent on the floor. “You’re not wasting anybody, son.”

“Little prick,” spat Suzie. “You look like the bitch to me.”

Joe glanced at James to make sure he wasn’t about to do something stupid. This close to the ringing bell, anyone might act impulsively, and lightning-fast. “James, we could use your help,” he said. He was a recruiter now, desperate to get the kid on his side to neutralize a potential threat. “You know what’s going on, right? The effect that bell’s having on everybody?”

“Yeah?”

“We’re going to knock it down and stop it. And I have a feeling that somebody might try to stop us.”

“Knock it down how?”

“Wrecking ball. I want you to stand guard while we do it. You and Josh, if we can trust him not to shoot us.”

Josh was getting to his feet, dusting off his rump. “I ain’t no bitch,” he said in a sulk. “Gimme back my gun.”

“Not till I know you aren’t going to try to
waste
us,” said Joe.

“Don’t trust him,” said Suzie.

Josh cut his eyes at her, but held his tongue.

“What do you say, James?” Joe asked him. “Can we count on you?”

* * *

James was torn. Like right down the middle. Part of him wanted to go Slim Shady on these square-john jokers and start busting caps at everybody, but another part of him wanted to do the right thing and do as the adult he respected had asked. Mr. Carr had always been good to him, special-ordering at discount the books he wanted and never looking down his nose at him, the way most adults did. More than once, James had wished his father had treated him with the same respect Mr. Carr showed him. He felt his eyes go wet and he suddenly blurted out: “They killed my mother and my grandmother.”

“Who did?”

“Bunch of naked tattooed freaks killed Mom in the church basement, and some Jesus-looking guy broke my grandmother’s neck. I shot him. Dead. Shot some of the freaks, too.”

“I’m sorry, James,” said Joe. “That’s terrible. People are killing each other all over town, which is why we have to stop it. We can all mourn our losses later, but right now we have to act.”

James wiped his eyes. “Why is it happening?”

“That is the question,” said Woolrich, holding up a finger.

“I wish I knew,” said Joe. “But the main thing now is to stop it.”

Suzie said to Josh: “Stop eyeballing me, boy.”

“How about you, Josh?” Joe asked him. “Can we count on you to be on the team?”

Josh shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so, if you’ll make her lay off me.”

“You were gonna shoot me,” she said with a raised voice. “You think I’m just gonna forget that? Think again, you little punk.”

“It’s the bell,” Joe reminded her.

“And I won’t trust the little prick until it stops ringing,” she said.

“Then let’s get to it,” said Joe. He walked into the gunroom and began to browse the deadly hardware. The ragtag little band of guerillas followed him.

* * *

Harry Loveless was surprised that he wasn’t dead. Being shot in the face at close range usually killed people in the movies, but here he was, up and walking. He paused to study his dim reflection in the dark window of a parked automobile. There was a small hole just below his left cheek where the .38 slug had entered, and a larger hole in the right side of his face where it had exited. Because he’d had his mouth open when the gun fired, the slug had missed his teeth as it passed over his tongue and punched out the opposite side. His face was a bloody mess and hurt like hell, but he knew he wasn’t grievously wounded. He would be permanently scarred, but so what? A humpback was anything but vain about his appearance. The wound in his hump hurt the most, but the bleeding seemed to have slowed. Harry was grateful he was alive, and he knew exactly what he had to do now. When the crazy woman shot him the second time and he thought he was about to die, his only thought was of his manuscript hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom. The thought of his masterpiece lying there undiscovered after he was dead and buried filled him with great remorse, and he sent up a silent prayer, asking God to grant him enough life to send
Lurkers At The Edge Of Time
to his agent with instructions to publish it posthumously, if necessary. And now that he knew he wasn’t dying—at least not right away—he was going home to rescue his novel from oblivion.

So intent was he on getting home, that he no longer heard the chiming church bell, nor did he notice the man with the garden tool following him down the street. It wasn’t until the man shouted: “Demon!” that Harry turned to see the little man charging him with a sling blade.

Harry yelped and tried to duck out of the path of the swinging blade, but the serrated teeth caught him on the left shoulder, spilling still more of his blood to the diabolical night. “Stop it!” Harry shouted. “Leave me alone! I’m just trying to go home, for God’s sake! Why won’t you people just leave me alone?” He began to cry. But the little man with the sling blade was undeterred and swung once more. Harry’s tears were tears of rage, and this time he was ready. He caught the wooden handle of the tool and ripped it from the man’s hands, then bashed it down on top of the man’s head. The little man wobbled, walked a near-perfect circle and sat down on the asphalt, bleeding profusely from the crown of his balding head. His eyes crossed and he fell over on his back, twitched once, then was still. Harry flung the sling blade into a dark yard, then he hurried homeward, hoping no one else would accost him along the way.

* * *

Sara’s head throbbed with venomous pain. It hurt so bad she felt nauseated and her vision blurred. It was the bell, she was sure. Each bong banged a nail deeper into her skull—at least that was how it felt. The pain was so ferocious that she no longer entertained thoughts of witnessing any impending revelation of the world behind the world. All she wanted was to get the hell away from that hounding sound. But she didn’t know if she was driving toward the bell or away from it. She was lost. She couldn’t see clearly. She only wanted to pull over and throw up and then put her head down and go to sleep. When she woke up, this nightmare would be over. Wishing Joe were here to help her, to protect and comfort her, she stopped the car, staggered out the door and vomited in the gutter at the edge of a vacant lot.

She ignored gunshots popping in the distance and collapsed in tall weeds and fell into something like a deep sleep.

* * *

Sandwiched between the two teenagers in the back seat, Woolrich took advantage of his captive audience and delivered a lecture on the dubious history of the church bell that had turned Druid Hills’ citizens into free-ranging bedlamites. Joe drove, and Suzie sat quietly in the passenger seat, watching houses and trees enter and leave her night window on the world.

“The Church went back and destroyed most of the documented evidence of the renegade order of monks,” Woolrich went on, “but what little remains tells the bizarre tale of a small band of brothers worshipping an omnipotent God vastly different from the God of the Old and New Testaments. In fact, the stern God of the Old Testament is an ineffectual fop compared to the angry Dark Lord these guys worshipped. They held that the traditional Holy Scriptures were little more than a blasphemous attempt to make the Judeo-Christian God acceptable to the masses, and that the one true God was a Holy Terror who had nothing but contempt for humanity and often sent His fierce angels to violently dispatch sinful mortals—when He tired of sending pestilence, war and famine. In short, they believed in a brutal God and that the concept of a loving Lord was a man-made myth, nothing more than wishful thinking. Heaven no more than an empty promise to lure the suckers into the tent.”

“What about the bell?” James asked.

“Ding dong the witch is dead,” chimed Josh, bored with the lecture.

“Apparently, the monks found a way to incorporate the science of alchemy into their religion, and they engaged noted alchemist Alenard Dampierre to forge the bell in accordance with their practice of ritual magick and deification of their brutal Lord. Though it isn’t spelled out in the remnants of remaining text, the implication is that the brethren intended to use the great iron bell to call down the wrath of God upon the neighboring populace.”

“If God was such a bad-ass, why did the monks need to call him down to kick ass?” asked James. “Wouldn’t He come on His own?”

“I think the monks believed God was so disappointed with His human creations that He wanted nothing more to do with them, so the monks thought that by calling down His wrath on sinners, they could show the Almighty that there might be hope for mankind yet.”

“In others words, they were sucking up,” James observed.

Woolrich chuckled. “Well, yes, something like that.”

Suzie turned in her seat to look at the professor. “My God,” she said, “that explains everything. The bell is calling down the wrath of God.”

“Bullshit,” said Joe, turning on the windshield wipers to clear the glass of accumulated raindrops. “You can’t really believe that crap.”

“Why not?” She punched his shoulder in a way that wasn’t quite playful. “You have a better explanation?”

“Yeah. Terrorism. Somebody slipped something into the water supply, something that makes people so hypersensitive to a noise like the constant ringing of a bell that it drives them nuts. Drives them to violence.”

“That’s farfetched to me,” she said. “I mean, look at how fucked up the world is. If God did create it, He sure as hell screwed it up big time. He’d
have
to be pissed off about it. And wanna take it out on us. And anyway, why would terrorists hit this little dipshit town?”

Josh laughed. “Dude…” he said by way of agreement.

Joe slowed down and rode the shoulder of the road to get past a three-car pile-up. Two bodies lay in the street, and one driver was slumped over the steering wheel of a Mazda 626.

“Guess they met their maker,” said James in a contrived off-handed manner.

“I don’t get you, Joe,” said Suzie. “You believe the bell is somehow causing all this, so why can’t you believe it’s God’s doing?”

“Let’s just drop it,” he said sharply.

“No. I want to know.”

“It’s just…too bleak,” he told her. “If I believed that, what would be the point of living? I’d sooner die.”

“Sooner than you think,” said Josh, pointing ahead at a makeshift roadblock manned by thuggish men with guns. Several of them sported shaved heads.

“Shit,” said Suzie. “Skinheads.”

“We can take ’em,” said Josh.

“No way,” said Joe, stopping the car and turning around in the road.

“Ah, man, whaddaya doin’?” said a disappointed Josh. “I always wanted to waste some skinheads.”

“You’re the one who’s wasted,” said Suzie.

“Fuck, you, ho!”

The Glock 19 semi-auto pistol Suzie had chosen for herself in Doyle’s appeared in her hand and she thrust it in Josh’s face. “Call me that again and I’ll open a new asshole in your face, punk.”

“Knock it off!” Joe shouted as he accelerated away from the skinheads’ roadblock. “Jesus, I can’t drive if I have to worry about a goddamn shoot-out in here.”

“Yeah, chill, baby.” James said it the way he thought Slim Shady would’ve said it.

“The Murdoch building is about a mile from here,” said Joe, “and I’d like to get there without you fools killing each other off.”

“Why we wanna go there?” asked Josh.

“To borrow a wrecking ball,” Woolrich said, “so we can knock the bell right out of the belfry.”

“Cool,” said Josh.

She knew she was dreaming. She and Joe didn’t have a waterbed, so there was no way he could be making love to her on a sloshing mattress, but that was what he was doing, so it had to be a dream. It was a dream she didn’t want to wake out of just yet, but something nagged at her to wake up, nagged like it was the end of the world or something, nagged her like that monotonous bell that wouldn’t stop ringing, so she rose out of the wet depths of the erotic dream and opened her eyes.