Malice (28 page)

A moment later, Lysander tore into the driveway of his house too fast to brake in time and rear-ended his father’s Buick, slamming his head against the steering wheel. For a terrifying second he felt the world swimming away from him. He pulled Chad up and over his shoulder and shuffled slowly, awkwardly toward his front door. Mercifully, the door was unlocked.

Inside, Lysander could see the blue glare from the television flickering in the other room. “Lysander, that you?” came his father’s disembodied voice. “Where you been, son?”

“Help. I need help,” Lysander shouted, cringing as he heard the deep unexpected bellow in his voice. He regretted now confessing to his father about the reverend. It was going to make this very complicated. He didn’t have time for complicated.

His father came scrambling around the corner, eyes wide like saucers. His hair was off to one side, the fear and shock on his face turning to blazing anger.

Lysander had expected no less.

“You get away from him!” his father growled, his face suffusing with a crazed expression.

But before Lysander could respond, his father was on him, one hand clamped firmly around his neck, the other belting him in the face and stomach.

“Call an ambulance,” Lysander was trying to say, but in actuality the words sounded more like “Curr ‘n ambulass.”

His father’s eyes were glazed. His breath was ripe with whiskey, and Lysander was suddenly worried for his life.

Now his mother appeared on the top riser in her nightgown, her hair tied back for sleep, and she was shrieking.

“Stop! Glenn, stop, you’re going to kill him!” Then she shrieked, for quite a different reason. Lysander would remember it afterward in spite of the pummeling being administered to him. “Oh, Glenn. Oh, God, I think my water. Glenn, oh God, my water…It’s…Glenn! The baby!”

Glenn’s grip slackened and his trembling hands came away. His jaw fell open and Lysander could see the wire frame holding his back teeth together. He was being torn by two almost impossibly strong drives—either pummel the shit out of the guy who had just brought his son home in a bloody mess, or tend to his wife, pregnant and about to give birth on the upstairs landing.

Glenn stood and bolted up the first two risers and then stopped, panting.

Lying on the ground, rubbing his throat, Lysander shouted. “Dad, will you call a fucking ambulance!” He pointed frantically at Chad. “He’s gonna die.”

Glenn turned to the crumpled, ashen-faced form on the ground, only dimly aware that Reverend Small, a man at least a decade older than he, had just called him “Dad.”

A shift in Glenn’s eyes indicated the realization that the person lying in a pool of blood in his front hallway was not Lysander. The boy was too stout. Glenn blinked thickly up at his wife, perched above him, holding her belly, and then bolted for the phone in the kitchen, spilling over one of the dining room chairs in the process.

His mother’s eyes were still fixed on him.

“Evelyn, I need to find Lysander. He’s in terrible danger.”

His mother’s expression changed. “Lysander?” In that moment she seemed to realize as well that the boy sprawled on the ground wasn’t her son. “Reverend Small, he was just here.”

Lysander rose, albeit with some difficulty and ambled up the stairs feeling like a one legged pirate. Step, plant, step, plant. He could see his mother growing fearful as he approached, inching away from him as though the angel of death himself were coming for her.

“What do you mean, just here?”

His mother was breathing heavily. Doing one of those fancy Lamaze exercises, sounding like a puffing train. “Lysander was here not ten minutes ago.” Fear filled her eyes, and she looked unsure how much to reveal to this man covered in blood. “He stormed in and ran up to his room. God knows what for. Maybe he was looking for something.”

“The locket,” he whispered and pushed passed her on the narrow stairway.

Lysander limped hard to his room and saw right away that it had been turned upside down. He went to his overturned night table, set it right side up again and pulled open the drawer. He reached a bloodied hand in and groped around until he found the locket, still taped to the underside of the drawer where he had hidden it. Battered and dented, but still in one piece. He slid it into his pocket and headed downstairs. He shuffled past his mother and out the front door toward the red sports car, growing more and more certain that he was already too late.

Samantha pushed against the large oak door of the McMurphy place. It swung open with a quiet groan. In the shimmering moonlight, she could see that the thick bolt keeping the McMurphy house locked lay shattered on the front porch. She groped around inside her jacket pocket, feeling for the reassuring angles of the revolver. But that uneasy feeling wasn’t going away. Could it have something to do with the awful smell that was making her nose wrinkle?

There had always been a certain foul quality to the air at the McMurphy house. It went hand in hand with a ruined old house, the way all old things gradually developed an odor of decay. But now the characteristic smell of mold had been replaced by something new and more vile. The olfactory force had hit her the minute she made it over the threshold—although she had caught small traces of it stepping from the cruiser.

What died in here?
she wondered, holding a hand up to her nose.

She could see the light from the lantern glimmering in a room up ahead.

“Lysander!” she called out.

No answer.

“Lysa—”

A hand touched her shoulder and she let out a yelp of fright.

A smile was floating in the gloom. Eyes peered out at her from shadowy sockets.

“Don’t be nervous,” the voice said

Samantha clutched her heart.

“I coulda blown your fucking head off! Jesus Christ, Lysander, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

There had been a subtle transformation in his expression when she had cursed. A twitching kind of expression she had never seen in him before. It looked strangely like…disapproval. The foul stench didn’t seem to be bothering him at all. In fact, he seemed to be savoring it.

“What’s that smell?” she asked. “It’s fucking awful.”

That disapproving look again.

Shivers trickled up her spine. Lysander’s presence, normally comforting and soothing, was beginning to frighten her.

“Who did you come with?” he asked. His breath was bad. That was weird, his breath was never bad. It was stinging her eyes.

She hesitated. “I’m alone.”

“That gun,” he said. He was in front of her now, about to walk away. “Don’t let it out of your sight.”

She gave him a strange look.

“We may need it.”

“We shouldn’t,” she said quickly. “My father and Jeff have gone to get Small. They say they have enough to nail his ass to the wall.”

He stopped suddenly, baring his teeth. “That’s good to hear.”

“Why did you call me?”

He was nearly halfway down the hall when he spoke. “I wanted to show you something. You’ll never believe it. It should tie things together quite nicely.” He was whisking his hands together with pride. “No loose ends.”

His back was turned to her, but she could hear the smile in his voice.

She followed, one hand over her nose, the other clutching the handle of the gun in her pocket. If the reverend came out at them—correction: if he was stupid enough to come out at them—she was ready.

Off they headed toward the room with the soft fluttering light.

***

Dorothy was finishing up another late night of work when a young assistant named Catherine Stapen came into the room Dorothy called her office, or her cell, depending on the mood she was in.

“I think we may have a problem,” the young woman said.

Dorothy peered up at her from under her reading glasses. “Nothing that can’t be fixed, I’m sure.”

But the panicked look on the young assistant’s face said it all. Something
was
wrong. Terribly wrong.

“It’s Peter Hume,” Catherine said as though the very name were explanation enough.

“Yes, what about him?” Dorothy barked.

The two women locked eyes, and fear passed from one to another. “He’s gone.”

***

The floorboards were moaning beneath Sam’s feet as she walked. She and Lysander were headed toward the old dining room. Tall shadows wavered and broke against the far wall, stretched fiendishly tall by the light of the lantern. Her heart beat like a trireme revved up to ramming speed.

“Lysander, I don’t like this. What is it you’re showing me?”

He disappeared into the room ahead of her.

She entered. The room was dim, webbed with pockets of deep shadow, but she could see enough.

In the center of the room was a long cherry wood table. Around it five chairs had been set. Seated clumsily in four of those were bodies in varying degrees of decomposition, all peering back at her. The two on the left were lipless.

On the far right was Avery, his corpse visibly bound to the seat with thick rope, looking very much alive except for his missing eyes and slashed throat. Lashed beside him was Peter Hume; his face pale gray. He was still wearing his tattered yellow cardigan. Next to him, with her head slumped on Hume’s shoulder, like two high school sweethearts, was Samantha’s mother. There were holes in her face where something had been nibbling at her cheek. The flesh flapped open like a can of half finished beans. The top of her scalp was missing, exposing a patch of grimy white bone. At the far end was a figure Samantha could only guess was James McMurphy, his features long since melted away, except for a set of crooked teeth: many of which were broken—presumably from the force of the shotgun going off in his mouth.

Her mind was spinning in dizzying circles …

The great big ship goes round and round…round and round…round and round…the great big ship goes round and
…

… trying to shut down.

A horrible dream, that’s all it is. Just a horrible dream
.

Slowly, she became aware of the screaming. It was a distant thing at first and then grew as the sound of a train might grow, bearing down on her, about to tear her in half. She took a half step and stumbled backward. Her shoulder blades sank into the moistened, decaying wall, and with the shocking touch came the realization that the one screaming had been her.

Lysander was gone.

From the hallway came the sound of the front door creaking open. A voice called out to her. Her instincts told her to run away from that voice, that it had come to hurt her. She spun toward the doorway, yanking the silver .357 from her pocket. She held it out in front of her, arms straight, hands trembling, barely aware anymore of the horrible stench.

Heavy footsteps traced down the hallway.

She backed away, hoping that there was nothing waiting behind her. The lantern, hung by the door, teetered ever so slightly. The shadow corpses swayed in time, back and forth, back and forth. The steps drew closer. She cocked the gun’s heavy metal hammer. Out of the darkened hallway came the reverend.

“Saman—”

Samantha closed her eyes and shot. The room exploded with a thunderous boom. A second later, she opened them and saw a man fall to his knees. He was not the reverend, and it took a moment for the reality of what she had done to sink in.

Alex looked up at her in surprise, a dark patch spreading out from the center of his chest. Then another set of footsteps could be heard.

The gun drooped to her side. What have I done? she thought numbly.

The staggered rhythm of these new footsteps was one she would have recognized, but she felt her hold on the world slipping away. On they came. Step, then drag. Step, then drag.

This is all a bad dream is what it is, just a bad terrible dream

This time it was the reverend. His face a mask of pain. Blood streaked his right cheek. He was pulling his left leg behind him and he opened his mouth to say something when his eyes fell on the man on the floor. Alex’s chest was jerking in tiny, shallow gasps of air.

“Oh, my God,” he said in a gravelly voice. “What have you done?”

Samantha raised the gun. “Get away from him!”

The reverend held out his arms. “Sam, I’m not who you think I am.” The sincerity in his face was distracting her. “I’m Lysander.”

Her head tilted, the way a dog might tilt its head trying to understand the gibberish of its master’s voice. This was a trick, she thought. Her head was spinning out of control.

“Shoot him, Sam!” a voice ordered from behind her. “What are you waiting for? Shoot!”

She glanced over her shoulder. Lysander emerged from the shadows. There was something wrong with his eyes. In that split second of doubt and confusion, she wondered if it might not be a trick of the light, but from here they looked sliver and dead.