Chapter Twenty-two

 

 

I

 

Jane awoke in a fog, the most obscene nightmares tittering at the fringes of her memory. Had she awakened to the sound of a bell?

She raised a hand to her throbbing head, felt a fat bandage there. When her vision cleared she noticed with some shock that she was in a hospital room.

What happened? Her memory was a blank.

"Hi, Jane."

She looked aside and saw the smiling Dr. Mitchell peering back at her through his circular spectacles. He was holding a clipboard.

Steve stood worriedly beside him, holding Jane's hand.

"Don't worry, you're going to be okay," Steve said.

"What happened?"

"In clinical terms," Dr. Mitchell answered, "you have a minor orbital concussion and sequent but extraneous abrasions."

"In not so clinical terms?" Jane asked.

"You dumped your car into a ravine off of Craker Avenue, banged your head pretty hard. One of my patrol units spotted you and called an ambulance. Jane, what were you doing out there?"

She felt bewildered. "I...I don't remember."

"A retrograde amnesic effect, Jane," Dr. Mitchell said. "It should pass in twenty-four hours, and so should the blurry vision and grogginess. If symptoms persist, though, call me."

"I think you should stay the night," Steve said.

"No, I don't feel that bad, just a little light-headed." She winced in frustration. "I just...wish I could remember what happened. Is my car-"

"Totaled, I'm afraid," Steve said. "We towed it into town. And the kids are fine; I posted a female officer at your house to look after them. Christ, Jane, I was worried."

"Well I still am! What the hell was I doing so far away from the post office?"

After Dr. Mitchell had released her, Steve took Jane home to his house. She wanted to talk about what happened, but the frustration just kept overwhelming her. "Why can't I remember anything?" This is just so aggravating.

"You heard the doctor," Steve said. "That smack on the head gave you a temporary loss of short-term memory. But you gotta do what they say, get some rest, take it easy for a few days."

Sure, she thought. Take it easy. Gimme a break. She couldn't remember anything. But in a moment, her eyes widened as a single memory popped into her mind. "Steve...I think."

Steve brought her some coffee to the kitchen table. "What? You remember something?"

"Dhevic," she whispered. "That's where I was."

"Dhevic? Where is he?" Steve stood poised at the information. "How did you get there?"

"He...left his address the day he came to my office."

"We've been trying to find out where he is all week, but- Why did you go there? I told you the guy's dangerous!"

"I had to talk to him. There were so many things he's said, things that were too uncanny. There was no one else to ask, Steve. But when I got there ..."Jane closed her eyes, struggled to remember.

The next flash of memory slapped her in the face. Her new employee, Doreen, lying naked and dead in Dhevic's bathtub. "My God, Steve, I remember now. You were right-"

"What?" He was leaning over, intent. "What do you remember?"

"There... there was a dead body in his bathtub, one of the girls who works for me. Her throat was slashed and ... she had that bell-shaped symbol cut into her chest-"

"Jesus Christ!" Steve exploded. "I told you he's the guy behind all this! You're lucky he didn't murder you too!"

"I got out through the bathroom window before he could get to me."

"Where's he staying?"

Jane gave Steve the slip of paper; he snatched the phone. "Dispatch, this is Chief Higgins. We finally got an eyewitness for capital murder against Alexander Dhevic. Send all units ten-six to the Palms Motel on thirty-fourth Street. Arrest Dhevic on sight, multiple homicide. And put out a state-wide all-points." He paused to ask Jane: "Any idea what he's driving?"

She'd seen that, too, hadn't she? The big SUV right in front of his motel-room door. "A Ford Explorer. It was silver. I know the make and model because I almost bought one once."

Steve piped the vehicle description to the dispatcher, and he hung up. Then he hugged Jane. "I'm sure he's not dumb enough to be anywhere near the motel now, but at least we can take him in when we find him."

"Where do you think he'd go from there?"

 

 

II

 

It was almost as if the woods conspired against him. Dhevic's footsteps crunched through heavy thicket; fallen branches snapped like firecrackers. He knew he had to be very careful now; he'd avoided the main road and came in through the other side of town, on foot. They'll be looking for me, he realized.

He wasn't terribly worried though. He knew that his Lord and Master would protect him.

Where is it? he thought. Had he lost his sense of direction? It should be coming up any second.

His hand reached out and pushed away some branches...and there it was.

The west branch post office sat alone in the moonlight. Dhevic looked for signs of police, saw none, then jogged to the building, using shadows for cover. There were no cars in the lot-would there be maintenance people here this late? I'll find out real soon, he thought. He opened a tattered briefcase, extracted his lock picks, and was in through a back door in little more time than it would take to open with the key.

Dhevic stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

 

 

III

 

The coffee was helping her feel better, even after the grisly recollection.

"You're right, though," she said at the table. "I'm sure he would've left the motel once I got away."

"Sure, but now that I've got an APB out-plus your description of his vehicle-every cop in the county is going to be looking for him. There's no way he can get away."

"God, I hope you're right."

"Relax, I am right." He poured more coffee for them both, then grabbed the phone again. "Let me call in and get a status report."

Jane went to the kitchen sink while Steve was on the phone. She needed some cold water in her face. It livened her, as she'd hoped, but it also sharpened the images of her memory: Doreen in Dhevic's bathtub. She could hear Steve talking in the background.

"Yeah, dispatch, it's Chief Higgins again. I need a status report on that APB."

 

 

IV

 

The strong flashlight beam roved over the darkened aisles, feeders, and collators. Just doesn't feel right up here, Dhevic thought. It would be an easy vibe. He spotted a door, hoped it led to the basement, and when he opened it, he was right. The only problem, now, was going down there.

I better not be afraid of the dark...

His stomach flipped when he began to step down. The darkness was so complete, it seemed to soak up half the flashlight's power. Downstairs was a clutter of shelves and storage bins. Columns of stacked boxes, in the shifting darkness, looked like men standing in wait.

He was scared, yes, but when his head began to hurt, he knew he was getting close.

There, he thought.

The beam hovered over a crawl space.

Dhevic got on his knees and began to crawl in.

 

 

V

 

Jane walked to the window in Steve's dining room, still playing over her thoughts. She didn't know where to start, what to do next; too much had happened for her to assess anything with any logic. "Good work," Steve was saying into the phone in the kitchen. "I can't believe it. And he had some of Doreen Fletcher's clothes in the car with him? That's rock-solid."

Jane's eyes widened.

"I can't believe we got him so fast," Steve said. "That psycho son of a bitch. Book his ass and put him in the detention center. I'll be down shortly."

Steve hung up. "Jane, great news. One of my mobile units arrested Dhevic a few minutes ago. He was heading for the interstate-"

Then Steve's look of confidence corroded into a frown of failure. He was looking directly at Jane.

Jane had the dining room phone to her ear. She slowly lowered it.

"Really? And who told you that? The dial tone you've been talking to the whole time?"

"How did you know?"

"I never specifically told you it was Doreen."

Steve sighed. "Smart girl, stupid me. But I kept you strung along long enough."

Jane's heart felt like it was twisting in her chest. "Why? You've been lying about this whole thing from the start? Why?"

Steve smiled sheepishly. "Well, not from the start. Just a few days ago, actually. When I met the Messenger."

 

 

VI

 

The crawlway was hot; cakes of dust stuck to the sweat on Dhevic's hands and face. A panel at the end of the cubby was pushed out, leaving a maw of utter black. Would a Rive be waiting for him? I'd be able to see it, he thought. Or at least I hope so.

It was hard to remain fearless; nevertheless, he crawled right up to the stinking opening and reached in.

What would he do if something reached back?

He closed his eyes and felt around. Yeah, if they'd used the striker to open a Rive, I'd definitely know by now.

There was nothing.

Then his hand landed on something: A box.

Don't count your blessings, he told himself. He pulled the box out. It was just a standard cardboard shipping box, oblong in shape. Its flaps stood open; Dhevic shined the flashlight in, and...

My God. This is it.

The iron striker of the Cymbellum Eosphorus lay at the bottom of the box. Dhevic grabbed it, kneed backward until he was out of the crawlspace.

But when he stood up and turned around, he could plainly see that he was no longer in the post office.

 

 

VII

 

Jane shrank into the corner. I guess this is it, she thought with amazingly little fear. This is the end.

"I was looking around in your west branch the other day," Steve said, "just looking for any clues or evidence, anything that might give me a lead as to how your employees all became connected to a cult, and, well, I found it. I found it in the basement."

 

 

VIII

 

The Rive opened before Dhevic's eyes. He was standing at the threshold, that narrow strip of anti-reality that exists between two worlds. To his back was his own world, to his front a byway to the abyss.

Dhevic looked across the blood-red sky, saw the black church in the pestiferous valley. Tall pale things encroached, tumid sex organs swinging at their groin, enlarged fruitlike heads, stick-thin limbs, all showing black veins beating beneath translucent-white skin.

Dhevic stepped back. Can they cross? he wondered, face glazed by sweat. Does the Rive allow them to cross from there...into here?

"No, but you can cross from here to there," a voice informed him from behind.

Hands latched on to him; Dhevic couldn't jerk loose. The striker fell to the basement floor and rolled away. Chuckling and shrieks of glee resounded about his head. Dhevic was turned in place, forced to glimpse his attackers: all human, all dead. Martin Parkins, Marlene Troy, Sarah Willoughby, Carlton Spence, and others he didn't know. Inhuman traits

had infused into their features-this close to the netherworld-tiny horns sticking out from their foreheads, grins full of fangs. The clawed hands gripped Dhevic as surely as chains.

Sarah and Marlene and several other women were nude, breasts gorged from excitement, nipples erect. As the men held Dhevic upright, the women's hands caressed Dhevic's groin.

"Get his pants off," Sarah urged.

"Let's get it out," Marlene panted. "I want to bite it off."

"Save that for the spermatademons," Carlton Spence ordered, gesturing with his eyes toward eager things that waited just across the threshold.

Dhevic was turned about again; a hand clenched in his hair pushed his face out, a half-inch away from the plane. Beyond, the pallid creatures slavered for him, some male, some female, some both. When Dhevic's head and shoulders were pushed fully through, bone-thin arms wrapped round his neck and puttylike lips sucked onto his. The cold demonic tongue

pushed through his teeth then dropped like a live snake to the bottom of his belly.

More claws grabbed him and pulled him all the way through.

He was laid out on steaming earth, his shirt pulled open, evil fingernails scratching crimson threads into his flesh, forming a campanulation.

The figures huddled around him, intently kneeling. When his genitals were touched through his slacks, they withered from revulsion. The tongue was retracted from his gut and then a penis like a foot-long maggot was thrust before his face. Dhevic squirmed.

Does a child of God go to heaven if he dies in hell? he wondered. He closed his eyes, to shut out the grinning, primeval faces above him, and then he muttered the first intercession to come to mind, from The Gospel According to John, " 'God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. There is no fear.'"

The sudden cannonade of shrieks threatened to implode his eardrums. The monstrous hands flew off him, the equally monstrous bodies crawling away on their knees in total horror. Some preferred to rip out their own throats and hearts rather than hear holy words in the most unholy of places. Others crawled away, vomiting black blood.

Dhevic stood up and smiled at them, held out his hands. "I live to love and serve the Lord on High. I am his unworthy servant forever."

Groans and bellows, like surf, rose up. A final prayer finished them, from Psalms:" 'But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer.'"

The creatures that hadn't yet killed themselves died then, at those final words, their bellies exploding, their eyes shooting out.

Dhevic could feel his aura beaming bright around his head, when he stepped back through the Rive.

Then the Rive closed.

Dhevic looked around, and...

 

 

IX

 

"Yeah, I found it in the basement, Jane," Steve was explaining, stepping closer. "That's where I met Doreen Fletcher, by the way, she came down to bring up some vending supplies.

Cute little thing, huh? Raping her and cutting her throat was fun, but it was even more fun doing it in Dhevic's motel, so you'd think he was part of it, and so we had dead-on evidence against him. We didn't even know where Dhevic was staying until the state police gave us a line on his check card."

"So Dhevic isn't part of this?" Jane said, lower lip trembling.

"No. His only Lord and Master is God, and I'm going to send him to meet God very soon."

"And now you're in the cult."

"It's not a cult." He kept stepping closer. "It's a congregation, Jane, a joyous one."

"And you're going to give a choice, right? I can join your congregation, or die?"

"Unfortunately... no. The Messenger has already made his mind up. For his message, Jane, his message to the world."

"What's the message?"

"Atrocity, abomination, everything in the human heart that's black and wrong and negative. Anything that exists as an antithesis to God. Simple. And tonight, you will help serve the Messenger. You will be part of his next message."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. When I strangle you in front of your kids, and then strangle your kids."

 

 

X

 

Martin, Carlton, Marlene, Sarah, and everyone else lay dead. Foul steam rose off the askew bodies. Dhevic  expected an onslaught when he stepped back through the Rive, but my prayer, he realized. Just words, but words charged by faith. They worked in both worlds.

So it was over?

He picked up the striker from the floor, hefted it in his hand. Then he gathered his things and left the building. As he stalked back through the woods to his truck, the familiar pinpoints of pain flared at his temples. Behind his closed eyes he saw crackling fringes of bright white, and in his head came the rising sound of something like rusty hinges-

And he saw one last thing.

 

 

XI

 

It seemed as though Jane had stopped breathing completely as she watched Steve step closer. There was only one light on in the kitchen, over the range; the dimness appeared to be merging with something- something immediately behind Steve.

A shadow?

No, it's...

But what was it?

Something was tainting Steve's features-perhaps it was Jane's fear, or so many powers of suggestion. She remembered little of what Dhevic had told her, some aspect of possession, something called machination. Was Steve really being manipulated by a bodiless spirit? Some entity that merged its mind and borrowed the possessee's flesh? Could that really be happening?

It really is, she knew now. Dhevic wasn't lying about any of this.

"Oh, I forgot to show you this, didn't I?" Steve said next, the form deepening behind him. He opened a closet to the side, one with a narrow door where one might expect an ironing board. There was an ironing board inside, all right, along with a dead body-or, as Jane discerned more clearly, pieces of a dead body. Severed arms and legs lay about the torso. There was no blood, and the wounds looked blackened. "Pretty good work, huh?" Steve said. "I did the job with a welding torch, cut her up with the flame while she was still alive."

The sight dizzied Jane. A once-pretty blond woman she'd seen before. Over her bare breasts, florid third-degree burns formed the campanulation of Aldezhor.

"She's not my sister, by the way. She's a stripper from St. Pete I was fucking."

Jane jerked her gaze away, feeling as though she were standing on a precipice.

When Steve spread his hands out to explain further, so did the shadow-boned thing behind him.

"For eons upon eons, the Messenger has walked the earth through us. We fulfill his eternal mission: to deliver the message of hell unto God's domain. It never ends, Jane. It goes on forever."

The shadow's hands were on Steve's hands now, urging them into a pocket, to withdraw a stout folding knife.

"We're going to take you back to your house, force your children to watch as we kill you. Then we'll kill Jennifer, while Kevin watches. Then we'll kill Kevin. We will spread the message. But first..."

There was nowhere Jane could go; she was jammed in the corner. Fighting him would be useless-her heart was faltering, and she felt about to pass out. He was right up next to her now, and behind him Jane could see the other face: smokelike, wavering in form, but she could see its bottomless eyes, its great horns, and the wanton grin.

"But before we do that, the Messenger wants to feel you, he wants to feel all the pleasures of your body. And we're going to do that right now, right here"-he held up the knife-"after I cut my lord's emblem into your skin."

Jane brought her hands to her face with a shriek, shut her eyes and went rigid. Steve tore open her blouse, cut off her bra.

"Behold the Messenger, Jane," flowed a pitch-black voice that was only partly Steve's. "The arrival of the Messenger is at hand."

He pressed her back against the wall, brought the tip of the knife to her chest, and-

 

Bam!

 

The window seemed to shatter before she even heard the shot. Jane fainted on the spot but before she lost consciousness completely, she saw half-a-dozen figures scrambling about the room.

Police.