Repairman Jack [03]-Conspiracies (16 page)

A portal would be opening soon. And as it did, he could only imagine what was going on with the sleeping sensitives racked on the floors above him. The last place he'd want to be right now was in their dreams. He almost felt sorry for them.

Almost.

Olive ...

... awakens to the sound of chanting. She forces her eyes open and gasps.

Hooded forms, thirteen of them, crowd around her bed, each holding a thick black candle. She screams but only a muffled squeak struggles past the cloth gag bunched in her mouth. She tries to move but her hands are tied behind her and she's bound to the bed.

Panic detonates within as she realizes her rings are gone, and the crucifix has been taken from around her neck.

"Did you think you could be saved, Olive?" says a voice.

It echoes from one of the forms but she can't tell which because their faces are lost in the inky shadows within their cowls. It sounds like her father's voice, but that can't be ... he's dead—he died ten years ago.

She begins to pray.
Our Father, Who art in Heaven
...

"Yes," says the voice, "I really do believe she thinks she's saved. Pathetic, isn't it."

Laughter from the other forms, male and female voices, mocking her.

"Let us remind you why you can never be saved," says the voice. "Let us take you back and show you why the face of God will be forever turned from you."

Olive screams through her gag.
Not that! Oh, please, not that again
!

She feels herself shrinking, the gag popping out of her mouth, the cords on her hands and feet falling away, to be replaced by bands of duct tape winding around her body, pinning her arms to her sides and her legs together. She tries to scream again but she has no voice here. The hotel room melts away, leaving her in a dank subcellar lit by smoky torches.

And she knows this place, oh, dear God, she remembers every detail of the horrors that were perpetrated here. For years, decades, she had no memory of these events, but gradually, through many sessions with her memory recovery therapist, she unlocked doors that had been sealed shut by her protective brain. One after another they opened and she learned what had happened to her.

And her father was the villain. After the divorce, her Bible-toting mother had filled her ears with maledictions about his drunken, no-account ways, yet still Olive had to spend every other weekend with him. And on one of those weekends, he and some of his friends dragged her along to one of their "services" ...

And now she sees the subcellar more clearly than ever before ... almost as if she's there ...

Suddenly she realizes that she
is
here. They're not going to make her remember ... she's five again and she's going to
relive
the horror.

No-no-no-no-no! PLEASE NO!

But she cannot turn away, cannot even close her eyes. It's all here—the pentagrams and inverted crosses painted in blood on the walls. Straight ahead lies a huge marble block, dripping red. In the high, deep fireplace to the right, something that looks like a monkey is turning on a spit.

A goblet is pressed to her lips.

"Drink!" says her father's voice.

When Olive sees the thick red fluid within, and sniffs the coppery odor, she turns her head away in revulsion.

"Drink!" the voice commands.

Her head is grabbed and tilted back, her jaws forced open; thick, warm, salty liquid pours into her mouth. She coughs, gags, but they keep pouring. She feels it running over her face, clogging her nostrils, she must swallow or drown, swallow or drown ...

Olive swallows, gasps, tries to vomit it back up, but they squeeze her throat and keep it down.

Then she's dragged to a table—a rough wooden bench, really—and watches as one of the hooded figures slices flesh from the monkey turning on the spit ... a chubby little thing with an unusually large head for a monkey. The flesh is laid before Olive. They don't even give her a chance to refuse it. The greasy meat is thrust into her mouth, then her jaws are forced shut and her nostrils pinched.

Again—swallow or suffocate.

She swallows.

Still gagging, she is carried to another corner of the room where a huge sow lies spread-eagled on a stone block. Its throat has been slit; its many-nippled abdomen has been opened and all the organs removed. Olive is folded into the red stinking cavity, her head in the pelvis, her feet against the diaphragm. She kicks and screams and twists as they sew the skin flaps closed, but to no avail. Soon she is entombed in the wet, suffocating darkness.

Never in her life, before or since, has Olive been so terrified, so mortally sick with fear and loathing. She is sure she is going to die. Past her sobs and whimpers she hears muffled chanting around her. The rotten air clogs in her throat. She can't breathe.

As a roaring grows in her ears and bright spots flare before her eyes, she feels a pair of hands gripping her head, the fingers curving under her jaw and pulling. Darkness still engulfs her. Where did the hands come from?

The hands pull, harder and harder, until she is sure her head will come off. She kicks toward the pressure and suddenly she's moving, squeezing through a tight, tight passage, and then there's air! Who'd have thought this dank subterranean air could smell so sweet? She sucks deep drafts as the rest of her body is pulled free of the sow through the space between its legs.

The chanters cheer and tear off their robes. They are naked beneath, and now they dance and drink and go into a rutting frenzy—men with women, women with women, men with men.

Child Olive squeezes her eyes shut while adult Olive thinks about all that followed after she regained these memories. She remembers confronting her father as he lay dying of cirrhosis—despite his toxic state, he gave a great performance of wounded incredulity. And even his mother, who hated the man and never had a good word to say about him, declared that he never could have been a part of such horrendous doings.

Lies, all lies.

Olive went to the local police. They investigated but could find no evidence of such a cult. Of course not. How could they? The evidence was three decades old.

Then she heard that the FBI was investigating the wave of reports of Satanic ritual abuse sweeping the country. Olive told them her story. The agents were properly sympathetic, and dutifully took down her information, but their investigation also yielded nothing.

How could that be? she wondered in all her naivete. How could one of the finest crime fighting organizations in the world find no evidence of such a widespread cult?

When she went back to the federal office and insisted that they keep looking, one of the investigators took her aside. He told her that they'd investigated hundreds of these claims and had yet to find any corroborating evidence. They'd combed through houses where others with recovered memories claimed that dozens of children had been ritually abused and sacrificed, and had found not a trace of blood. He even went so far as to suggest to Olive that what she remembered most likely never happened, that it was something called false memory syndrome, instilled by suggestions from her memory recovery therapist.

Olive thanked him very much ... and fled the building.

Because then she knew ... the very people she was turning to for help were part of the problem. This was bigger than she ever had imagined. Higher-ups in the government were linked to a powerful worldwide network of murderous satanic pedophiles and pornographers who destroyed all evidence when they could, and planted disinformation when they could not. And when that didn't work, the Lord of Evil protected them—Satan himself implanted distortions in the brains of survivors, to make them seem like poor delusional fools.

A filigree of deceit encasing the world, concealing the truth ...

Abruptly Olive is no longer lying on the floor. She feels sheets around her, a mattress against her back. And she is no longer a child.

She opens her eyes. She is back in her hotel room, and the Satanists are gathered again around her bed.

"So you plainly see, Olive," says her father's mocking voice, "why you can never be saved. You have drunk human blood and eaten human flesh. In God's eyes you are a blight on His creation, you are anathema. You will be cast into hell where we can all be together—for eternity!"

"No!" she cries. "I'm saved! I've been born again!"

Vicious laughter all around as her father says, "Born again? Olive, dear, you cannot be born again into the Spirit, because you have
already
been born again—of a sow!" The laughter grows louder. "And when did you last hear of a
pig
entering heaven?"

Olive sobs. She squeezes her eyes shut and claps her hands over her ears—for some reason, her hands are free now—to shut out the laughter. Soon the laughter fades. Hesitantly, she opens her eyes ...

She was alone.

Olive sat up in her bed and rubbed her eyes. She looked around in the darkness. Across the room, next to the square shadow of the TV, the red glowing numerals on the alarm clock read 4:28.

Relief flooded through her. A dream ... an appalling, horrifying dream, but only a dream. Her father was dead. He couldn't hurt her anymore. He—

Olive froze. The glowing numerals had disappeared ... as if someone had stepped between her and the clock. She sensed movement on both sides of her.

Oh, no! Please, God, NO!

She couldn't bear to relive that again. She opened her mouth to scream but a leather-clad hand slithered across her face and sealed her lips ...

Jack ...

... awakens to a sound ... a scratching noise ...

He sits up and focuses on it. Coming from the door. He reaches under the pillow and finds the Glock; he works the slide to chamber a round, then pads to the door.

As he reaches it, he notices the odor.

Rakoshi stink.

Not again. But that was a dream. This is real.

He puts his eye to the peephole and peers into the hall. Something wrong out there. All the lights are out. It's like peeking into a coffin ... but it smells worse.

Then he sees the eyes, pairs of glowing yellow almond-shaped slits floating in the darkness, and he knows.

Rakoshi!

No time to wonder how as a huge weight slams against the other side of the door. Jack jumps back. The weight hits the door again, and again, until the wood shatters, sending splinter missiles hurtling toward him.

Jack backpedals across the room, firing all the way. He jumps onto the bed. With his back to the wall he blasts wildly, down and around, everywhere he sees the eyes.

When the clip is empty, he stands there panting, sweating. The eyes are gone and he can't hear anything past the ringing in his ears. Slowly, cautiously, he bends, gropes, finds the switch on the bedside lamp, and turns it.

Blinking in the sudden glare, he gasps at the sight of a dozen or more hulking, cobalt-skinned creatures milling about the room, unharmed by the fusillade he's just loosed at them. They turn their shark-snouted heads his way, bare their teeth, and rake the air with their talons, but they do not approach. They merely watch him with their yellow basilisk eyes, as if waiting for him to fall over dead. No hurry. He's not going anywhere.

How
? How did they get to his room without causing a panic and leaving a trail of bloody carnage in their wake?

And what the hell are they waiting for?

He should be glad they're waiting. His extra clips are in his gym bag over by the door. Not that they would do much good—bullets never seemed to have much effect on these things. But fire ... yeah, fire works.

He glances at the lamp. If he broke the bulb, could he spark a flame with the exposed innards?

He's reaching for it when he hears a voice.

"Do not be afraid, Jack."

He jerks around. Who—?

One of the rakoshi, larger than the rest, has moved closer, gesturing to him.

"We are your brothers."

The voice seems to be coming from the rakosh. But that's impossible.

"What?" he says aloud, feeling like an idiot.

The rakoshi he knew had the brains of pit bulls and the deadly homing instincts of Tomahawk missiles—and were about as explosively destructive. The ones he killed could say a word or two, but were far behind the dumbest parrot in the vocabulary department.

And yet the voice is there, calling him by name.

"You are half rakosh, Jack. You have denied your true nature long enough. It is time at last to come out of the closet."

What the hell is it talking about?

"Purge your human side, Jack, and come the rest of the way over. It is just a step. Just one easy step."

"You're crazy," he says, and it sounds so lame.

"Still in denial, then? We feared that. We know what is keeping you from embracing your true nature, and because you are our brother, we will help you cross over."

Jack notices a commotion over by the shattered door—the rakoshi there seem suddenly agitated. Jack pauses, then feels his blood crystallize as Gia and Vicky are dragged into view. All the air seems to rush from the room, leaving him gasping.

"Jack!" they scream in unison as they see him.

He moves toward them but the big rakosh slams him back against the wall and pins him there.

"
Wait
," it says.

Jack watches in horror as Gia is driven to the floor. Half a dozen rakoshi surround her, blocking her from view. He struggles frantically to get free, clubbing at the big rakosh with his empty pistol, but he's pinned like a moth to a board. He shouts in rage and anguish as he sees their talons rise and fall, going down clean, coming up red. He hears Gia's wails of pain, Vicky's cries of horror. Gia's blood spatters the wall and Jack goes mad—black closes in around the edges of his crimson vision. With a joint-popping lunge he breaks free of the rakosh's grasp and makes a diving leap toward the melee.

In the air he has a glimpse of Gia's torn body, her wide blue eyes beseeching him as the life fades from them. He shouts in horror, but is batted away—powerful arms grip him and hurl him toward the window. He crashes through the glass but manages to twist and catch the sill. He's hanging by his fingertips, kicking for purchase on the brick wall, unable to see into the room but hearing Vicky's wails of terror turn to screams of pain, and then end with a gurgle and he knows she's gone and it's too late to save her, too late for both of them, and without them, what's the point of going on? Because if he can't save them, if of all people he can't protect Gia and Vicky, then his whole life is a sham and he might as well end it here.