The Messenger (2011 reformat) (28 page)

Shock was
beginning to dim her vision; she noticed the mailman close the door and lock
it, then he walked over and sat down on the couch. He sat intently at the edge
of the cushion, staring raptry as Claudette squirmed in the multihanded
embrace. "I'm at the end of the line, if you know what I mean," he
said, and lit a cigarette. "Sloppy sevenths. I'll watch until it's my
turn."

But Claudette
was essentially not comprehending now. The room seemed darker than usual. Had
the other men closed the drapes? But she also noted weird orange light
flickering behind her. And what those awful hands were pinning her down to
wasn't the plush heather-green living room carpet.

It felt like
mud.

Shapes shifted
above her. Long fingers wormed at her crotch and breasts, popping off the bra
and tiny bottoms. Someone, or thing, was kissing her now; Claudette was so
revolted she almost threw up when a tongue that seemed a foot long pushed
through her pressed lips. When she bit the tongue, nothing happened. It was
like biting leather. The only reaction from her attacker was a hot chuckle that
flowed into her mouth, then the tongue went all the way down her throat until
she could feel it wriggling in her stomach. Meanwhile, fingers invaded her sex,
and her breasts were kneaded like raw baker's dough. When Claudette began to
convulse from suffocation, the impossible black tongue retracted. She heaved in
a breath just before she would've died.

"They're
called spermatademons, ain't that a hoot? I mean, that's what they call them
down there," the mailman rambled on. "I had to be on the other end of
that, too, just like you, only with me, it was part of my punishment. Oh, I
guess you don't know what I'm talking about, huh?" A bleak laugh.
"Let me put it this way: it hurts to sit down. Those boys ain't
particular."

One was on her
now. The other pinned her shoulders down and spread her legs with hands that
gripped like metal bands. Her vision began to clear; when she turned her face
away, she saw-

What in God's
name?

Claudette
wasn't in her living room. She was in a cave whose hewn rock walls oozed and
steamed. And she noticed at once the source of the weird flickering orange
light. Torches topped by wads of pitch were flickering from various areas,
their shafts stuck into rock. It looked medieval.

I'm in hell,
she realized through the madness.

"It's
this," the mailman said. He pulled something out of his bag that at first
she thought was a club. "You got any idea what this is, Mrs. Peterson?"

Claudette
could hardly answer. Huge fleshy things were entering her, thrusting in and out
like pistons.

But she could
hear, and she heard the mailman say this: "It's kind of like a key, I
guess. It opens a door that they call a Rive. You're on the other side of that
door right now."

Something was
changing her. She should be horrified but she wasn't any longer. She was
excited, she was eager for each new lover who climbed on top of her. The
mailman was still holding that club-like object. It must've weighed twenty
pounds: a stout bar of old metal that looked like iron, a ring at one end and a
star-like ball at the other end.

"This is
a bell striker, Mrs. Peterson," the mailman continued, "and believe me,
it ain't from around here. Has special powers is what the Messenger told me. It
opens that door I was telling you about. It opens that Rive."

Claudette
wasn't really even hearing him anymore. She was climaxing in spastic quakes.
Even when she saw the details of the impossible men who were taking her, she
wasn't disgusted. Brownish veins could be seen through their semi-translucent
white flesh. Primeval, huge-eyed with fang-filled slits for grins, heads
misshapen like small boulders. And horns.

So her lovers
weren't men at all.

She stole a
peek out of the cave and could see more of the void beyond. It looked endless.
She saw masses of naked people, some deformed, some missing limbs, others only
retaining part of their former humanity after undergoing some process of
hybridization. She could also see a lake not too far from the mouth of the
cave. The lake was steaming, and it wasn't water that filled it, it looked like
blood, bubbling. From the lake things that seemed to have beaks rose up and
plodded into the mass of humans, tearing into them, ripping off strips of skin
and pecking out eyes with gleeful abandon. Some were actually pulled into the
lake, screaming as they were devoured by still more unspeakable things below the
surface. All the while, the chasm echoed in a never-ending cacophony of moans,
laughs, shrieks, and screams.

Claudette was
pretty much insane by now, out of her mind in an erotic frenzy. She didn't care
what happened to her. She wished she could be here always. She could see the
mailman on the other side of the Rive. He put the bell striker back in his bag,
then took off his clothes. Around Claudette, the pallid demons lay exhausted;
she'd spent them all and only wanted more. She panted, muck-covered, inflamed,
and looked up.

The mailman's
naked body looked strange. His stomach was swollen and his skin was covered
with blue and black blotches. "I'm dead," he said and kind of
chuckled, "but the Messenger keeps me alive to do his business.  He has
messages that need to be delivered, and I'm helping him. I'm being
punished"-he held his hands out, to display his slowly rotting physique-"so
this is what I get. I gotta earn back his respect, you know? Now I'm gonna take
my turn and when I'm done, I'm gonna slit you open and clean you out like a Thanksgiving
turkey. Nothing personal. It's just what I gotta do, okay?"

He began to
walk forward, approaching the Rive. Claudette waited anxiously, squirming in
anticipation. But then the mailman stopped and yelled, "Damn it!"

He was looking
down at his bare groin. His penis, which was already half gone to rot, fell
off. It sat curled on the carpet like a lost tidbit.

"So much
for me having my turn. Ain't that just my luck? I'll tell ya, life, death,
either one. They're both a kick in the ass."

The mailman
went back to his bag and pulled out a large carving knife.

I

The door
exploded, flying to bits out of its steel security frame. Two uniformed police
stepped quickly back with the door ram, while several more skirted around them
and tactically entered the house, guns drawn and aimed high and low. The house
was surrounded by local mobile units, several ambulances, and some county
sheriff's department cars.

"What's
the name here?" one cop just outside asked. He was watching the windows.

Another cop,
surveying the corner of the house, said, "Peterson. No rap sheet, no
calls, nothing. Husband's at work so it should only be the wife inside."

"So
what's the scoop?

"Neighbor
said he thought he heard a scream after seeing a mailman at the door. But
there's no mail truck."

"What is
all this mailman shit?"

Inside, the
first team clearing the living room stopped cold, their faces blanched as they
looked down at what lay on the floor.

"Chief
Higgins!"

Steve entered
and stopped, looking down just as grimly.

The thing on
the floor was only vaguely recognizable as a human female. Steve felt instantly
sick to his stomach. Had the woman actually been skinned? Who could do
something like that? The crimson stick figure lay asprawl. Even the face had
been cut off, but the scalp had not; the expert cutting job left the shining,
perfectly straight red hair intact and carefully lying over the victim's
shoulders. An open gash in her

abdomen gaped,
the cavity within empty. Most revolting of all was the position: almost a lewd
pose, legs spread, arms out like a woman in wait of her lover on the living
room floor. A grislier thought occurred to him with the image. Last night he'd
made love to Jane...on the living room floor.

He gritted his
teeth, tried to blink the atrocity out of his head, but it wasn't working even
when he looked away.

This couldn't
possibly be Parkins, he tried to convince himself.

"Aw,
Jesus!" another cop said, backing away from the coat closet.

Steve went
over and stared. In the closet hung several light jackets, a pool robe, and a
few raincoats. But right at the end hung what could only be Mrs. Claudette
Peterson's skin, hanging there like a suit of clothes. The only part not intact
was the face, which had been cut off the neck and hung through an eyehole off a
peg on the hat rack.

"Check it
out, Chief," one of his uniforms said. "No big surprise by now,
huh?"

Steve
practically staggered over to the voice. What now, what now? What could be
worse?

His gaze fell
on the floor of the bedroom, where a pile of organs lay. The other cops were
looking away, silent. Then Steve's gaze lifted to the wall, to the blood
fashioned symbol that he was now beginning to see on a regular basis around
here-the bell with the star shape for a striker.

II

Jane's eyes
widened on the drawing: the bell with the star shape for a striker. At first,
she was so on edge by Dhevic's sudden appearance at her office that she didn't
fully focus on what he was saying. "Have you seen this before?" was
the very first thing out of his mouth, and then he held a leather folder that
contained what appeared to be several thick polycarbonate sheets. The
plasticized material was being used to protect a piece of paper, from what
Dhevic described as a very, very old book. He placed the first protective sheet
on her desk blotter. "It's an engraving in a tome entitled Das Grimoire de
Praelata!" Then he'd gone on to talk about how these occult visionaries
called prelates some thousand years ago had used psychic powers to establish
mental contact with particular souls in hell. Some of these prelates were
artists and engravers, and here, supposedly, was one of their engravings.

She easily
recalled the nature of the source, a so-called expert on the occult, as seen on
tabloid shows.

However...

Something
about him, this tall, intense, middle-aged man, seemed genuine.

"Have
you, Ms. Ryan?"

"Have I
seen this symbol before? Yes, I have."

"I know
you have," he said very mysteriously, and she was too uneasy to ask him
what he'd meant. Then he went on, "It's a quasi-geometric shape that we
call a campanulation. Effectively, it's left at the scene of a ritual murder,
written in blood. It's thought to be more of a homage-or simply more
powerful-if it is done in the blood of an oblation."

Jane sat
listless at the desk, glancing down at the engraving in the old book, then up
to him. He'd remained standing, his presence filling the small office.
"Oblation?" she asked. "What's that?"

"The
blood of a sacrifant, I should say the blood of an innocent person used as the
body of a sacrifice. The only more powerful offering is the campanulation left
in the blood of an acolyte, one who sacrifices himself as a suicidal tribute.
Have there been any such suicides that you know of, Ms. Ryan?"

She didn't
answer, at least not vocally. But there had been, hadn't there? Marlene.
Carlton. Both had killed themselves, leaving the symbol in blood. Theirs and
their victims.

Dhevic
continued, with that floating, accented voice, while pointing to the engraving.
"The campanulation. A bell shape. It's a representation of that bell, Ms. Ryan.
Note the star-shaped clapper."

"I see
it," she said.

"Something's
happening here, Ms. Ryan. You know that it's not merely coincidental."

"How do I
know that?" she asked, not sure what point there'd be in challenging him.

Was he
smiling? "You know. You've got ritualized crimes from twenty years ago
corresponding to identical crimes today, and the single most pertinent common
denominator is-"

"My post
office," Jane finished.

"That's
correct. And what I must know is this: Do any of your employees belong to any
radical religious cults, or conform to odd religious beliefs?"

Jane smirked.
"No. The police already asked me the same thing-"

"I'm not
surprised."

"-and I
told them the same thing. I told them no."

"But
you're struggling with that, aren't you?"

Jane paused in
a weird silence. She was struggling with that. Steve believed it, he simply
couldn't make a solid connection. But even Jane couldn't argue with the logic.
"I agree. There is some kind of cult connection, there has to be. It'd be
illogical at this point to not believe that."

"Now
we're getting somewhere. Do you mind if I sit down?"

Jane looked up
at him. She simply didn't know what to make of the man. Steve had implied that
Dhevic might even be part of it, part of the cult connection camouflaging
himself with his credentials, but now that Jane had met the man, she didn't buy
it. She didn't necessarily like him, but she didn't believe he was a killer.
She could see it in his eyes. I should just call Steve, tell him the guy's
here. He'd want to talk to him anyway. But when the thought left her head,
Dhevic was looking at the phone, then glanced back to her with a raised brow.