They (10 page)

The man that had grabbed her stepped in front of her, and now she got a good look at him. He was young, with short dark hair, wearing dark slacks and a dark coat over a white shirt. His accomplice was blond, his features gaunt, his skinny frame bearing loose fitting jeans and a billowy shirt. They looked indifferent as they gazed down at her.
What do they want from me, oh my God, what do they want
—

“We can make this easy, or we can make this very hard,” the first man said in slow, measured tones. “It doesn’t matter to us, but it will to you. You can either go through the same torture your friend went through, or you can tell us what we need to know right now. And if you think your death will be connected to your friend’s, you can forget it. If you decide not to cooperate, we will torture you, but the authorities will think you’ve succumbed to heart failure. It’s really quite simple to do, especially once you’ve given yourself over to the Dark Lord.”

Oh sweet Jesus, help me Lord, give me strength, get thee behind me Satan
—

“So what will it be, Lillian?” The man leaned forward as the young woman stood up and pointed at her. The young woman began chanting in a fluting, musical voice.
An homine en guterish en domine en deamon ia, shggth nggslamna hanbi
.

“So what will it be, Lillian?” the man said and suddenly, as if by magic, hundreds of large spiders were crawling on her, covering the floor, crawling up her legs and body, some already crawling up her neck. She instinctively tried to bolt out of the chair but something was holding her back as if she was tied down. “Will you tell us everything Maggie Walters told you? We know she told you about her son and us. Please, indulge us.”

Lillian looked up at the man, her eyes open wide in fear as she felt the first spider sink its fangs into the soft flesh of her belly. A minute later another spider bit into her neck and Lillian screamed through the tape.

“We can make this all go away now if you wish. You know what to do.”

Maggie’s words went through Lillian’s brain.
You are not to tell anybody about this. You are to dig up the box, then take it and the contents to Reverend Powell. Read them together
. She thought about what Maggie had died for, thought about the way she’d died, about the symbols written in blood on the wall of her bedroom. There was no way she was going to betray her friend. There was no way she was going to give in to these denizens of Satan.

And Lillian, her fear rising, casting a quick prayer up to her Lord to give her strength, shook her head slowly.
No
.

In the end, the torture was to be a thousand times worse than Maggie’s.

June 24, 1999, 10:30 PM, Pacific Standard Time.

Hollywood, California.

FRANK BLACK SAT at the bar inside Harry’s Pub on the Strip, surprised that the glass sitting in front of him didn’t contain an alcoholic beverage.

He took a sip of his Coca-Cola and surveyed the bar from his position. Man, how the place had changed. Originally an Italian restaurant, Harry’s quickly became a haven for movie stars and producers in the forties and fifties. Due to its proximity to the Rainbow Bar and Grill across the street, the spot became a hangout for rock stars in the 1980s. With Gazarri’s (now called the Key Club), the Roxy and the Whiskey A Go-Go across the street as well, Harry’s quickly became the watering hole for members of Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Aerosmith, and every rock star that came to Los Angeles. In the 1980s it became the hangout spot for the scores of aspiring musicians that played the clubs and littered the sunset strip with flyers for their bands. The LAPD made nightly arrests for everything from fights to public drunkenness to drug dealing. Sometimes they busted people for no reason other than to provide amusement for themselves, thus proving militant blacks wrong that the LAPD was down on African Americans. Frank had seen them beat the crap out of people of all races just because they felt like it. Once he’d been arrested while walking
to
Harry’s. He hadn’t taken a drink all day, he hadn’t been carrying, and he was cold sober. The pigs had just wanted to hassle him because he was wearing a leather jacket and had long hair.

But all that had changed. Now fourteen years later, Frank was not only sober and loving it, he was married to a loving woman named Brandy and he had a three-year old son named Mark and a two-month old daughter named Melody. He was recently experiencing an upswing in his writing career—he’d almost destroyed it eight years ago when he was deep in his heroin addiction—and he was producing the best work in his life. His income was good, better than it had ever been, and the gigs kept coming in. Most of what they used to pay the mortgage on the condo and the bills came from the CD-ROM games he was writing and Brandy’s partnership in the modeling agency she co-owned with her mother. Now that his fiction-writing career was taking off again, he was selling novels. It was only a matter of time before he gained a solid readership. And then…

And now here he was, sitting in Harry’s Bar and Grill wondering why he would risk losing it all again.

Frank took another sip of coke. Neil Young came on the bar’s sound system, screeching that we had to keep on rocking in a free world. Brandy had taken the kids to her mother’s for dinner after Frank told her he had a meeting in West Hollywood with the CD ROM people to discuss next year’s projects. The CD ROM gigs had become so lucrative that she’d bought the lie. It was the first time he’d ever lied to her in the five years they’d been together.
Amazing
, he thought, drumming his fingers on the bar.
To think that all that I have overcome: inadequate feelings about myself, alcoholism, heroin addiction, destroying my career in publishing, using women for my own sexual needs, allowing women to use
me
for their sexual needs, lying to people to score the next gig, the next fix, the next fuck. I overcome all
that
, I redeem myself before God Himself, and now I’m sitting in Harry’s Bar and Grill, the most tempting bar in Los Angeles where one can score the drug or woman of their choice without even trying, after having just lied to my wife about what I am doing tonight
.

Jesus
.

He set the empty glass on the bar. The bartender approached and Frank signaled for another. The bartender refilled his glass with Coca-Cola and placed it in front of him on a napkin. The bartender, who was large and hulking with a bald head and large hoop earrings, motioned at him. “Nice tats,” he said. “Where do you get your work done?”

Frank moved his arms out. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a Harley Davidson insignia on the front. His tattoos were very well displayed. “Rick Bennett over at Good Time Charlie’s does my work now,” he said.

“They’re gorgeous,” the bartender said, wiping down glasses. His arms were tastefully decorated as well, although not as intricately as Frank’s. Both of Frank’s arms were heavily tattooed from the wrist all the way to the shoulder, blending into the pectorals in the front and snaking down his back to his waist. When Frank went shirtless he got quite a few stares, most of them admiring. The tattoos were Japanese in style, artfully rendered, the bottom designs black tribal, the flourishes a vast array of blending images that melted into one another. To Frank, the designs were reflections of who he was, his experiences, his moods. He had been getting tattooed since he was twenty-one, but had not gotten seriously into it until after he became sober. He found that he enjoyed the sting of the tattoo needle better than the syringe.

In time, the tattooing filled that void left from his addiction.

“Rose Tattoos does mine,” the bartender said. He turned his arms toward Frank, showing off a large portrait of a woman, an evil looking alien, and a mythical figure slumped against a tree. They were striking. “They just did a skull on the back of my left shoulder.”

“Hurts like a bitch, don’t it?” Frank asked, grinning.

“You bet!” The bartender said. “You ever had your back done?”

“I’m having a back piece done now.”

“Your whole back?”

“My whole back.”

“Wow!” The bartender raised his eyebrows in amazement.

A young couple dressed in flannel shirts and blue jeans took a pair of seats at the opposite end of the bar. The bartender turned his attention to them and Frank took another sip of his coke.

He’d started out the evening aimlessly, driving the Saturn around the city, letting his mind wander with whatever thoughts he might have and come home. But he found himself driving down the strip, and when he passed Larabee he thought about Harry’s. He pulled into the parking lot down the street and entered without a moment’s hesitation. And he’d been sitting at the bar drinking cokes and thinking ever since.

He supposed the whole thing had started two years ago with the dreams.

In the beginning they’d been mere haunting images that remained in his mind long after work. He used several of the images in short stories that he sold to magazines. But then they began getting worse. He began having dreams about normal looking people hanging out with him, treating him very friendly, almost as if he were family. And then just as he would begin to ease into the relationships they would change suddenly into hideous monsters. They would become beast-like, resembling various creatures; sometimes bearing the large bulbous eyes of a fly; other times the trunk and tusks of an elephant; other times the flat snout and tusks of a wild boar. Sometimes they would turn into combinations of all three, their various identities meshing together, merging from one to the other, then swimming back to human form, all the while voices rose in his mind, singing, droning voices intermingling with the harsh chants of what sounded like praying.

He woke up screaming the first time the dreams became so vivid. Brandy had to wake him up before he realized he was screaming in his sleep, clawing the air in front of him. He’d collapsed in her arms, out of breath, his heart racing with fright. At first he thought it was an LSD flashback. It was much easier to blame such a horrifying nightmare on the indulgences of his youth.

Without realizing he was doing it, he wrote a novel about the dream, using the images as a metaphor for the monsters that are inside some people. His agent sold it first trip out. It had been his first horror novel in seven years. It was called
Those Inside
.

It became the best received of all of his works, with the exception of the first book of the science fiction trilogy that had come out the year before. Frank Black had carved a reputation for himself in the world of science fiction, and despite the two horror novels he had published during that time—
Conversion
, which was a vampire novel, and
In the Cellar
—he was still typecast as a science fiction author. Even when he got back into publishing again, his first sale was a science fiction novel. He’d always liked horror stories, but had never been inspired to write them. His science fiction stories were weird enough.

But writing
Those Inside
seemed to trigger an untapped well. The week after it sold, he got an idea for a batch of short horror fiction. He was knee deep in writing the third novel for his trilogy, he’d just landed the CD ROM gigs, and life was on the upswing. He’d plugged on, fighting the good fight.

Those Inside
had not only triggered an untapped well, it also drained him. The dreams came more regularly, which puzzled him. Writing about the things that bothered him usually purged those demons, but instead the dreams were coming more and more frequently. He began attending his AA meetings more regularly, actually volunteering for things at his local AA chapter, something he’d never done. The dreams kept coming, growing worse in their repulsiveness, and it was then that he began to slip.

He began smoking pot again.

Hemp had always served as a good escape vehicle in the past and it proved to be more so now. And with California’s new medicinal marijuana law on the books, he liked to tell himself that he had a legitimate claim for his use of it. He tried to get to the bottom of the dreams through therapy, but he was making no headway there. He’d started smoking pot again one night after dropping some work off at the home of the man that owned the CD ROM company. “You look beat,” Jeff Townsend had said that night. “Something wrong?”

“Haven’t been getting any sleep,” Frank had said. The dreams had been keeping him up and Mark was hitting his terrible two’s, which made it worse. “I’m really stressed out.”

Jeff had already fired up a joint and handed it to him. “Have a hit. Sit down. Relax a little bit.”

And he did. He didn’t even think about the consequences of what falling off the wagon would do to him. He took two hits off the joint and it hit him immediately. He felt relaxed and at ease; more relaxed than he felt in a long time.

He’d bought a dime bag of pot from Jeff that night and took it up again. He did not slip further down the ladder of Schedule 1 drugs like he feared he would. Pot was all he did. As a medicinal tool, it worked wonders. It relaxed him, made him calm, more at ease.

Naturally, Brandy was worried about his descent back into drug use, but when he displayed no signs of going back to the harder stuff, or alcohol, she relaxed a little but kept a wary eye on him. What she
was
worried about were the memories being unearthed in his therapy sessions, which he resumed late last summer.

The first time he told her about the memories he’d buried so long ago, memories he never even knew he
had
, he’d wept in her arms in utter fear.

The therapy sessions had continued, unearthing long buried horrors of his past.

He’d found out his mother had been involved.

In early fall he realized he wanted to find out exactly what had happened to him. But most importantly, he wanted to find out what had happened to his father.

Two years before, a man named Mike Peterson had called Frank out of the blue. Mike claimed to be a friend of his father’s. At the time, the only thing Frank knew about his father was that he’d left his mother when he was three. He’d barely remembered the man. He’d talked to Mike on the phone and told him that he had no idea where his father was and had no desire to know, thank you very much, and he was doing just fine without daddy-o around. Mike had been pleasant enough and had told Frank that if he
ever
wanted to talk about his father, if he ever wanted to talk about
anything
, to call him. He’d left Frank his phone number and that was it.