Bloodstone (29 page)

“You might not like what you see. What we find out there.”

“I can handle it,” Harry said. The hard glint was back in his eyes. “I can handle whatever that bastard throws at us.”

Maybe so
, Billy Smith thought.
But can I?

They returned to the front room of the empty police station. Several rifles stood behind glass on a rack on the back wall. Stowe broke the glass and reached through.

There were blue raincoats in the closet. Some sort of automatic pistol lay in the top right-hand drawer of the front desk, unloaded, along with a pair of handcuffs. Smith pocketed them both. It took them a few minutes to find the ammunition, but they finally located it in the locked bottom drawer of the file cabinet. Three boxes of shells for the rifles (they emptied these into their pockets) and two clips for the handgun. Then Smith went through the desk again, looking for a flashlight. The Thomas place would be dark. Finally, he found a heavy-duty model with a steel grip winking at him from the back of the middle drawer.

The wind screeched and battered them as they climbed into Stowe’s Volvo. Little raging rivers ran down the pavement, carrying leaves and twigs and bits of trash. They could see part of the square between the backs of houses, and even through the blowing rain the destruction was clearly visible. Bits of color clung to the treetops, pieces of tattered decorations. The booths were nothing more than shattered boards sticking up from the ground.

They made it out of the parking lot. On the way past the church cemetery, Stowe suddenly clamped both feet down on the brake pedal. The big car came to a shuddering, sliding stop in the middle of the road.

“Holy fuck,” Stowe said in awe. The cemetery looked like a battlefield. The ground had erupted, spilling mud and hunks of sod everywhere. Stones had been tipped up and overturned, and now lay every which way in the grass like broken teeth. Empty graves loomed here and there like black, open
sores in the earth. The cemetery gate swung back and forth in the storm, making a cracking sound like a bone breaking as it clipped the posts and rebounded, again and again.

The windshield wipers whined. At the far end of their line of sight, where the church building met the cemetery plots, there was movement, barely visible through the sheet of rain. Something gray and naked and obscenely human slipped around the corner of the building and disappeared.

They drove on, skirting the edge of the ravaged square, and pulled up in front of the Thomas mansion. It crouched among the trees like a huge and twisted animal ready to spring. Most of the upper windows were shuttered, but one on the right was bare, and gave him the unsettling feeling that the house was winking at them.

Stowe was pulling the rifle out of the back seat and popping shells into it, one by one. “Used to go deer hunting with my uncle up in the hills when I was a kid. Never killed anything before. Once I had one in my sights, and I froze up. Just froze up. Damn thing looked at me, turned tail, and hopped away.” He gave Smith a look that was almost a grimace. “Sorry, I was rambling. I do that when I’m nervous.”

“Harry—”

“What are we hunting? Can you tell me that? Anything that can be killed?”

The question seemed to hang in the air.
We both know
damn well what we’re hunting
, he thought, but didn’t say it. Finally, he shrugged. “We’ll know when we see it.”

Stowe was looking at him again. “Those graves,” he said. “Nobody dug them up, did they?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, hell. Night of the living dead.” He sighed and wiped a hand across his face. “I told you I can handle it.”

Smith was thinking about the child again. His child. Nothing more than a collection of cells at this point, clinging to the wall of her womb. But Frederick Thomas was
reaching out from the void even now, with the help of Jeb Taylor, wanting to claim those cells for himself, wanting to create…what? A lifeless husk to inhabit? A walking, breathing vehicle for another soul? And if he succeeded, what would he bring with him into the world? Such a resurrection surely had a price.

Stowe had opened the door, and the cold wet rain blowing across the car and into his face brought him back. Smith pulled the gun from his pocket and slapped a clip into the butt, the way he’d seen it done. The back of his throat itched for a drink. He shut it out of his mind and stepped out of the car. He had to act now, or the town and everyone in it would be lost. And he knew Angel would not survive whatever was supposed to happen. He would be responsible for her death, above all others. His sister. A surge of conflicting emotion washed over him. God, he still loved her, still wanted desperately to be with her. He couldn’t shut the feelings off like that, no matter how hard he tried.

They crossed in front of the car and trotted up the walk. Rain dripped down around his ears, into the collar of the slicker. It slid like cold hands down his back to his waist. He stared at the house. The anger was growing, and now the fear came too, and he welcomed it. Fear, he could handle. Fear was natural.

The door was wide open, the same side door he had entered a few evenings before in pursuit of Jeb Taylor. Beyond it, darkness beckoned. Smith wrestled the big silver flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on.

Inside the smell hit him at once. He played the light around the floor and saw a number of muddy, incoherent tracks leading off in the direction of the hall. There were signs of a struggle; bloody splashes on the white sheets.

Then the light fell upon the body hanging beneath the arch. It was a young man in greasy overalls, tall and well built. His hands had been nailed to the frame on each side of the arch, and he hung crucified, his body slumped forward,
his legs splayed wide apart and bent at odd angles below the knee, his feet nailed to the floor. Blood ran down the overalls in a dark, dripping stain, and pooled on the floor below his crotch. There was something else odd about the body, but it took him a second to realize what it was. The boy’s head had been turned around to face backwards.

He heard a sharp intake of breath from behind him, and then Harry hurried forward. But there was nothing that could be done to save this patient. Harry touched the head, turning it back towards the light. It wobbled loosely on its stalk of a neck, and Smith felt a greasy sickness in his belly. “Broken,” Harry said. “Arms and legs, too.” His voice held the barest tremor. “It’s Dick Pritchard, Lester’s boy. About Jeb’s age. One of the ones who picked on him when they were kids. Poor son of a bitch.”

“We’ll have to get him down,” Smith said. “We have to go through.” He set the handgun and flashlight on the sheet-covered table, moved forward and grasped the cold, dead flesh of the boy’s right arm, as Harry grabbed the left. “Pull,” he said. There was a terrible, wet, tearing sound as the nails jerked through flesh, and then they lowered the body gently to the floor. As it fell forward, the nails came free from the boy’s feet, leaving two small, nearly bloodless holes.

“That was bad,” Smith said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling his belly begin to churn again.
Only the beginning
, he thought,
if you can’t stand up to this
much, then you might as well go home
. There were worse things ahead. The back of his throat began to itch again, as if in reply.

Just as they reached the study the voices began again. At first they were nothing more than a whisper, almost inaudible over the muffled howl of the wind. Then they gained strength like a radio tuning itself in, floating through the cavernous rooms, echoes drifting down across the years. “Do you hear that?” Stowe asked. He had stopped dead in his tracks at the study door, listening.

“I hear them,” Smith said grimly. “Don’t pay any attention.”

But it was difficult. The voices had taken a distinctively nasty turn. They ranted and raved incoherently. There were screams of pain, a woman sobbing. Sounds of a struggle; the screams began again. Another voice, male, spoke in a tongue Smith had never heard before. The words were guttural, corrupt, obscene.

The footprints led to the basement door. Smith shined the light down the first few steps. “This may be the end of the line,” he said. “I was in this cellar the last time, and it doesn’t seem to have any way out.”

The voices went on, ranting louder now. They looked at each other. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Smith began down the steps, the gun and flashlight held out against the dark, one in each hand.

When he reached the cold stone floor he swept the light along the walls and was relieved to find the carved earth chamber empty once again. He let out a deep breath. The heavy, rotten beams seemed to breathe with him, and he thought, quite clearly,
if this house is alive, I am standing in
its lungs
.

“Jeb Taylor disappeared down here once before,” he said. “There must be another way out. We have to find it.”

They began to search the big, empty room. The voices continued above them, muffled now like the storm, shrieks of agony, screams of rage and violence, and then the shrieks slowly dissolving into a woman’s racking sobs.
You bastard
, Smith thought as he worked his way around the room, searching for cracks in the solid earthen walls.
You raped
her. Raped your own sister
. Henrietta had had three children by him. Had the rape happened again, and again? Or had she finally given in, her spirit broken, willing to submit if only to avoid the physical pain Frederick inflicted?

The majority of muddy tracks seemed to congregate in
one corner of the room, and that was where they finally found what they were looking for. A corner of one of the big stone slabs was a little out of place, and when they tried to lift it they found it was just a thin, flat piece of rock that concealed an old rotten trapdoor underneath. They raised the heavy trapdoor together, with some difficulty, the edges of the wood crumbling in their hands and making it almost impossible to gain a solid grip.

Below it, a square, black hole, descending deeper into the earth. From this rose a stench that made all the others pale in comparison. Stowe stumbled away from it, holding a hand across his nose and mouth. “My God,” he breathed softly, through his fingers.

The flashlight revealed the remains of a wooden ladder clinging to one side of the hole, its rungs streaked with fresh blood. Smith put the gun in his pocket and stepped down on the first rung carefully, feeling the spongy wood give under his shoes, and then lowered himself to the next. Incredibly, the wood held. He felt dirt pressing in close on all sides, and kept going, knowing that to stop would be to give in to claustrophobia.

Thankfully, the ladder was no more than six or seven feet long. From the bottom rung there was another drop of a few feet, and then he was standing on the packed earth floor of a narrow, black tunnel, perhaps three yards across at its widest point. He flashed the light around and saw crumbling wooden beams bracing the low ceiling at intermittent intervals. Dirty water dripped down the walls. A faint breath of noxious air touched his face, and was gone.

His hackles rose. He drew the gun. There was a cracking sound, a muffled curse, and Harry Stowe dropped on all fours beside him, the rifle clattering to the earth. “That last rung gave on me—” he began, and then looked up. “Incredible,” he whispered, gaining his feet and staring down the empty tunnel. “How long has this been here, do you think?”

Billy Smith wasn’t listening. He had gotten a sudden clear
picture in his head of oily black water stretching out below a midnight sky. It was as if he had been holding a pair of binoculars before his eyes and someone had just adjusted the focus, so that the two blurred images joined and became one. The Thomas mansion was only a diseased limb; it was in another place where the sickness had begun, and where, God-willing, it would end. A place where dead gray trees rose like ghosts through the mist.

He remembered the white face of a ghoul, grinning at them through dirty glass.

“Frederick built it,” he said. “It leads to the old Taylor property on Black Pond.”

They had been moving along in tense silence for perhaps five minutes. The tunnel sloped gently downward for the first hundred feet or so, then leveled off. The earth was soggy and ice-cold under their shoes. The flashlight danced along length after length of dark walls and darker wooden beams that were thicker than his chest. Here and there a minor cave-in had spilled a mound of dirt from the ceiling and they stepped over these carefully, as if avoiding something that might eat the shoes right off their feet.

The tunnel took many small twists and turns, but it always seemed to return to the same general direction. There was only one place where they could possibly end up. All this time, he had believed that the evil in Ronnie Taylor had been responsible for that sour spot of earth below the falls. He realized now that it had been the other way around. Ronnie Taylor had picked the wrong place to build his house, that was all, and over the months the ground had taken its toll on him, and the amulet had done the rest.

But who the hell had dug this tunnel? In the years before machinery it seemed impossible that something like this could have been created. Frederick had had help, of course. But he wouldn’t have been able to turn to the local villagers.
Smith didn’t want to think of what kind of help he might have received.

The flashlight flickered and he froze, holding his breath. Something had moved up ahead in the darkness. Terror washed over him now, making his legs tremble and his bladder ache. “
Billy
,” Stowe hissed. He was pointing to a point about thirty feet ahead, where the tunnel took a sudden turn to the right. Smith flattened himself against the wall, and slapped the flashlight against his forearm. It flickered again, and then came on strong. He raised the beam of light.

Sheriff Claude Pepper was coming steadily toward them out of the shadows. Something had been chewing on his face and throat; the front of his uniform was soaked with blood. One ear was gone, the other hanging by a ribbon of flesh. The fingers of his right hand had been bitten off at the first knuckle, and the mangled stumps wriggled in the air in front of him like fat bloody worms. It took Smith a moment to realize the odd swishing sound came from the sheriff’s two pant legs rubbing together.