Bloodstone (30 page)

A small, trapped noise escaped his mouth. He raised the handgun and tried to pull the trigger, but the gun would not fire. The beam of the flashlight bobbed in his hand and threw monstrous shadows across the walls.

A shot rang out just behind him, deafening in the close confines of the tunnel. Dirt showered down upon his head. The sheriff stumbled back a few steps, and kept going. Stowe’s bullet had taken him in his fleshy stomach; a quarter-sized hole showed near his belt.

The rifle roared again. This time Pepper’s head jerked back on his neck, and he paused, not ten feet away. One hand went to his ruined face, exploring the contours of it as if for the first time. Stowe pulled the trigger once more, and a hole appeared in the back of the hand. The big man twitched like a puppet on strings, dropped heavily to his knees, and then fell face first into the cold black mud.

“There,” Stowe said quietly. His voice was cracking. “There, you bastard.”

Smith looked at him. Stowe was gripping the rifle too hard; his face was flushed, his hair hung wetly across his forehead, and his eyes were hidden in two circles of shadow. Caught in the strange, yellow beam of the flashlight, he looked like a madman.

“Harry…” he said. Stowe jerked his head around and stared at him. His mouth was a thin white line. “Thanks,” Smith finished simply. His legs felt rubbery. Stowe kept staring at him a moment, then he nodded and took a deep, rattling breath.

“Safety,” he said. “Turn off the fucking safety.”

Smith turned the handgun over and found the red button on its side. He felt like he was going to be sick.

At their feet, Pepper’s huge body twitched in the mud, like a landed fish.

They moved on. Twice more, they ran into roadblocks. The first, a big, white ghostly creature who turned out to be a very dead Barbara Trask in a nightdress, had almost gotten her hands on them. She had been waiting around another sharp bend in the tunnel, and although mangled as badly as the sheriff in other ways (her neck was a mess of tangled, red flesh), her face was mostly intact, which made it more difficult to shoot. Smith froze up, finger on the trigger, and her eyes fixed on him. He saw the lust there, as bright and naked as the full moon. He had time to wonder what might happen if she touched him, and then Stowe came to his rescue again, pressing the barrel of his rifle against the side of her head and pulling the trigger, splattering most of her brains against one of the wooden tunnel beams and dropping her, twitching, at his feet. Stowe looked whiter after that, and his hands trembled like a drunk’s after a hard night. But he did not falter.

Then, just as they turned to continue, the huge dog came at them out of the dark, and this time Billy Smith did not hesitate. He fired five times into the dog’s snarling face. Blood and brain and shards of bone flew up in a bright red cloud, and when it was done, the dog was on the ground next to its owner. The top of its head was gone, but it kept trying to gain its feet. Smith was reminded of a turtle flipped over onto its back. He steeled his stomach, walked up, placed a foot on the big dog’s neck (even now it tried to snap weakly at him), and emptied the magazine into its skull.

Finally only the tips of its paws moved, scraping uselessly against the thick mud. It looked like a dog trying to run in its sleep. Except this dog wore nothing but a red pulpy mess above its shoulders.
Oh Jesus
, he thought dully, looking at the paws twitch. His throat felt thick and swollen.
I’m
not going to make it
.

Then Stowe’s hand was on his shoulder. He did not say a word; the look in his eyes was enough.

They went on. A few minutes later the tunnel began to rise, and the mud was not as thick under their feet. They began to hear the thunder again, a distant booming sound like artillery. As Smith walked, each step seemed to increase the load he carried around his shoulders, and the terrible doubts and depression that had plagued him since that morning kept creeping back at him. Doubts, he realized, that had never really left; he had simply allowed the urgency in Harry Stowe and his own anger at being played for a fool to carry him through so far. His mind returned to the night he and Angel had investigated the Taylor property for the first time, the way the trees had moved with the passing of something gigantic and dark, and he remembered the way he had turned tail and run like a frightened child from the puffy white face of his dead mother in the dirty window.

He thought of Angel. For a moment, that great shining dam inside his soul groaned under the weight of his guilt, and almost gave way. Why was he here? Was there nothing
more to it than an ancient curse, was he doomed from the very beginning, as he had often thought? And if so, would he have a chance to look the darkness in the eye before it sent him tumbling into the void?

Does the devil know who made him? Where he came
from? Or is he just like us, constantly questioning his existence,
the reason for it all, the meaning?

Light, up ahead. The tunnel was coming to an end. Above their heads they could hear the thundering voice of the unknown.

The tunnel ended abruptly at another ladder. This one was fashioned out of newer wood; it looked as if it would hold their weight easily. Gray, lifeless light filtered down through cracks in the trapdoor above. Smith looked up into the narrow shaft, water dripping onto his face. He listened. All sound had ceased, except the rain and the whistling wind.

“Well?” Harry Stowe whispered. Stowe’s voice did not seem to belong to him. It was high and tight and shaking. But his eyes were still bright and sane, and he stood with both feet braced and ready. He had not hesitated for a single moment. Not when it counted. Smith felt an almost overwhelming gratitude. He hadn’t had to carry the burden alone, after all.
Without
you, I’d be dead right now
, he thought.
I’d go into battle
with you anytime, my friend
.

“Go to her,” Stowe said. “I’ll watch your back.”

Smith closed his eyes, and willed himself to relax, letting that hand inside his mind flex its psychic fingers and come to life. He would have to be careful this time, he knew. There were dangers within this realm as well, false steps that could mean death, if he began to feel around in the wrong place. The darkness was close.

Reaching, he pushed out gently—

—and joined. This time, entering her mind was as easy and smooth as listening to his own thoughts. He almost cried out with joy. So shallow to think that the only closeness between
a man and woman came from the physical act. That was simply one way of sharing a
mind
together, and even then, even during the best of it, the touch was just the barest brushing of mental fingertips. Not like this. Never like this.

There was no fear this time, no conscious thought. She was asleep, or out cold, and dreaming. Her (their) dreams were unfocused, flowing flowerbeds of color. They floated as one through plains of soft white and green and blue smoke, pale shadow shapes slipping close, then away again like little birds. He heard their wings beating, felt their caresses upon his face. Warmth flowed through his limbs, tears ran freely down his face, and the burdens began to lift, he was growing lighter, lighter still, ah, Jesus, the beauty of it…

He was being shaken, hard. “
Billy!
” someone said against his ear. He came partway back, jolted out of the dream. Cold gray light filtered through his closed lids. He tried to brush the hands away and found them pulling at him again. “Billy, come on, not now, oh, Christ…”

Harry. He opened his eyes and found himself standing in the tunnel again. Real tears flowed down his cheeks. They were cold against his skin.

Harry Stowe was staring anxiously into his face. “Don’t,” Smith muttered absently. “Don’t do that. Don’t take me out.”

“
Where is she?
”

“I don’t know. She was asleep.” She was still there; he could feel the dreams playing in the back of his own mind. There was a faint, sweet taste in his mouth, the taste of candy apples. He had the odd, disjointed feeling of being in two places at once. The connection between them had been stretched thin, but not broken.

He wanted only to return to the dream. Reality was so hard.

“You want to help her, don’t you?” Stowe shook him again. “He’ll murder her when he’s done. You told me that yourself. Do you want to be a part of it?
Do
you?”

Smith winced.
No. Please don’t ask me to leave her,
though. Please don’t ask me that
.

Stowe simply pushed him toward the ladder. The rough wood against his hands brought him back a little farther, and he began to climb. The gun was gone; he thought he remembered stuffing it into his pocket.

He reached the trapdoor. The water was dripping faster now, running through the cracks in the wood. He reached up, pushed and felt it give. Colors were still blooming in front of his eyes, greens and soft reds and blues. It was like looking through colored glasses at a dead winter world. Inside was where you wanted to be, inside, where it was warm and you could smell wood from a fire and your feet were stuffed into a pair of soft, comfortable slippers.

Stowe was hitting his legs from below the ladder. He looked up. The trapdoor was open. Had he done that? He couldn’t quite remember. He climbed the last two rungs, grabbed the edges of the frame and lifted himself over.

And stepped into Ronnie Taylor’s domain.

He was standing in the middle of a ruined room. The roof was sagging and there was an open hole above his head, bare and broken rafters pointing up into a splintered gray sky. Rain slashed into his upturned face. There was a gaping hole just to the left of where he stood, where the floorboards had rotted and fallen in. The walls had crumbled in places, plaster giving way to glimpses of the wooden frame and the world outside.

This had been the kitchen in the old Taylor home; the ends of rusted, broken pipes stuck out from the wall below a shattered window, and in the corner sat part of a chipped porcelain sink, half full of brown water. Through the remains of the window he could see the rippling water of the pond and the tire swing flipping crazily in the wind.

He turned toward the door, which now hung crookedly on its hinges. The next room was more or less intact. The floor was solid, the roof and walls closed. This was where it had
happened; Ronnie raising the broom handle again and again, bringing it down in a vicious, slashing arc, turning his wife’s face into something unrecognizable, blood thrown in wide, splattering half-moons across the floor, the sofa, the walls. Then taking the knife up from the kitchen and going after the baby in her womb.

Or had that happened first? Had he tried to take the baby from her and failed, and only then taken up the broom handle in a frenzy of rage? Had he realized, too late, that his blood was not quite pure enough? That he was not the one they wanted, after all?

Smith blinked. Rainwater ran freely down his face and mixed with his tears. His nightmarish vision faded slowly, and the woman with the bloody, beaten face changed, but did not disappear.

Angel was lying on her back in the middle of the floor. Someone had drawn a circle around her body with red paint. No, blood; of course it would be blood. She was still whole, thank God, and alive. There was a pile of white bones near her head. He stared, not quite sure what he was seeing. The bones were
wriggling
like grubs. Frederick’s remains, even now trying to come to life.

Then he knew what was meant to happen, and he recoiled from it as if struck. Jeb would butcher her, as his father had done to his mother years ago, and this time, Frederick and the thing that had taken him long ago would get what they wanted.

Stowe had come up the ladder behind him, and he went forward quickly toward the next room where Angel lay, skirting the edges of the places where the floor had fallen in.
No
, Smith thought dully, watching him go. He wanted to cry out, but his voice had left him.
That’s what he wants, he
wants to separate us
.

But it was too late. As Stowe knelt beside Angel’s body, knocking the bones away with a cry of disgust, the crooked door picked itself up and slammed shut with a bang, cutting
them off. Smith jumped; the noise and sudden movement seemed to break the spell that had fallen over him. He ran forward across the spongy floorboards and threw himself against the door, battering it with his fists. He could hear Stowe shouting on the other side. But the door would not budge.

“What’s happening!” he screamed. He could feel the ground thrumming under his feet, as if the very earth was coming alive. A great gust of wind shook the little shack. For a moment he thought it might go right over and sink into the foul black mud, burying them all forever.

Then the voice spoke up in his mind, dark and dripping with a naked lust that made him shriek with fear.
So you’ve
finally come. Welcome. Welcome to the void
.

Angel was drifting through a pleasant warm fog. Somewhere along the line (time had no meaning here in this perfect place), someone had taken her hand, and they drifted together for a while, and that was nice. She felt as if she knew this hand, like it belonged to someone she had been waiting to come for a long time. At first she thought it was her brother’s hand, but he had died years ago. He was gone forever. For a moment the familiar ache of the loss passed through her, and then it faded away.

The hand pulled away. She reached for it but she couldn’t catch it again. This was troubling; it was like having an itch on your back in that spot you couldn’t quite reach.

Then someone was shaking her. She heard a voice calling her name. The fog was replaced by the feeling of cold, hard boards against her back. She opened her eyes. Harry Stowe was slapping her cheeks lightly. “There you are,” he said, when she looked up at him in confusion. “Thank God. I was beginning to think we were too late.”

Everything came crashing back at once. Annie, dead, and that thing coming down at her from the ceiling…she shook her head. The hand in her mind was still there. But
she had lost its grip, and now she could not find it again. It was an odd sensation. Voices, echoing through her head, none of them making any sense.

She tried to gain her feet. Pain ripped through her stomach, and she cried out in surprise.

“You have to keep still—”

“Billy!” Something was happening to him; she felt for the hand again, but it eluded her. Damn it, she could not see!

“We can’t do anything now,” Stowe said. “The door’s stuck. He’s on his own.”

Then she cried out again, because she could see how vulnerable he was, how his guilt would open the crack and let the darkness in. Jeb Taylor had been only a diversion, a plaything, something that could be used and then thrown away.

Oh, Billy
, she thought.
It’s you they want, don’t you see?
It was you all along. It has to be you
.

The voice, booming through his skull, struck him dumb.
We’ve been waiting for you
, the voice said.
We’re all here.
Jeb and his father and a good many others. Aren’t you going
to come and say hello?

He was filled with a mindless, seething rage. He whirled around and saw Jeb Taylor hanging there like a huge black vulture against the ruined wall, his long coat billowing in the wind. Jeb’s face was a constantly changing canvas, a boiling, seething ruin in which different features surfaced and then disappeared.

Will you come into the void with us?

No!

But you must. There is no other place to go. The void is all
there is
.

His mind rebelled against the idea. Death, with all its mystery, could not end in something so terrible, so empty.
That’s not true. You lie
.

The thing in the dark coat raised a bony finger.
Look,
then. Look upon them, and see
.

Helpless, he looked. Through the broken window, and at intervals where the walls had rotted through to outside, he could see the corpses gathering at the edges of the clearing. They were in all stages of decay, some of them mostly whole, a few no more than bones and tattered flesh. Skulls gleamed whitely through the slashing rain as they stumbled blindly closer.
Oh, dear God
, he thought.
Please. I can’t
fight them all
.

They smell the fresh life here, and they come
. The creature against the wall was grinning at him, its features congealing. Red, burning eyes regarded him with all the coldness of a reptile. He knew he was seeing Frederick, not the man in the painting that hung in the Thomas study, but the way he was now, after the evil had turned him.
The woman and children
you killed. Did you think that was an accident? Nothing is an
accident. You are meant for this. Search yourself. You have
always been meant for this
.

He did search himself, and hated what he saw. The weakness, the fatal flaw that had always been there, waiting to take him down. As Jeb Taylor’s weakness had taken him.
We are connected
, Smith thought.
I could have been him; I
was him, years ago, and only a freak accident was enough to
sober me up and stop me from killing myself
. The line between good and evil was so fine it sometimes blurred or disappeared completely.
One day you look down and realize
you’ve stepped over it somewhere and you can’t get back
.

Had he crossed that line between good and evil long ago? Had the dice been loaded from the very beginning?
Sorry,
house rules. Now roll
.

He looked back at the thing against the wall. It was holding out a small silver flask.
Take it, Billy. Bring us new life,
and join us forever. We’ll even let you come out once in a
while
.

Ah, God, the thirst. It ripped at him, cutting him to the
bone, leaving him defenseless. Suddenly he couldn’t think of anything else. Offering him sleep, precious sleep. He reached for the flask. As his hand closed over it, something rippled and changed and he was holding the handle of a long, curved knife.

“That’s right,” the Jeb-creature said eagerly. “Go on. Do it, and you will forget everything. You’ll finally have peace.”

Billy Smith thought of the three lives he had taken so cruelly, lives that were worth so much more than his could ever be. Children who would never see another day, never see their own children’s faces. Were they in the void, too? It couldn’t be. He would not believe that. The guilt was so heavy he thought he might break. Here was his chance to settle his own private score. Words came back to him, words he had heard from the very beginning, and had not made sense to him, until now.
Those who have reached the end
and been born again
. That was him, wasn’t it? He had reached the end a long time ago.

Now, he was being offered a chance to make up for what he had done by making the ultimate sacrifice, and through that, only through that, could he be reborn.

“Go on,” the thing said.
That’s what you were meant to do
what are you waiting for go and DO IT
—

In this last moment, full of wonder, he knew; the void was not all there was, because there was goodness in the world too, there was love, and the devil was a liar.
It’s not
about forgetting, Angel
, he thought triumphantly,
my sweet,
sweet Angel. It’s about remembering the past, remembering
all of it, because only through that can we learn to do what’s
right
.

He held the blade high above with both hands, letting the rain wash it clean, and then he brought it down, plunging it handle-deep into his own belly.

Something shrieked inside his skull. He sat down hard on the wet floor, his legs folding underneath him. Through a
dull haze of pain he heard the door to the other room burst open, and then he saw the Jeb-creature coming at him from the wall, a great, swooping monster, its features contorted into a grimace of anger and pain.

As it reached for the handle of the knife, trying to pull it from him, and as the dam finally let go somewhere deep inside, Billy Smith did the last thing he could do.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out the police handcuffs from the station, and slapped one side on himself and the other onto Jeb Taylor’s wrist.

The thing screamed. It thrashed wildly against the cuffs, trying in vain to get free. Smith felt his own arm being yanked almost out of his socket. But the cuffs held firm. The dam had been ripped away now, his soul was bare, and the feelings came pouring out of him, making him gasp, bringing the tears again. The dam, releasing the flood that he always knew would carry him away.

A great, dull roar had come up over the sound of the howling wind, a roar growing louder by the second. He got a sudden clear picture of the lake next to the Old Mill Inn, swollen and massive, thousands upon thousands of gallons of water held back by a single stretch of cracked concrete. He saw the concrete crumbling, bits of mortar falling into the stream, the stream growing stronger, faster, until the barrier gave way all at once and the water thundered down the deep riverbed, swelling and engulfing the falls, boiling through the flat stretch of land, a huge wave of water erasing everything in its path.

Okay
, he thought, letting the pain slowly take him into its arms.
If there’s something good out there somewhere, listen
up. I’ve done my part, now you do yours. Show me I was
right, after all
.

She had gained her feet in spite of the pain in her belly, and Stowe was standing with his arm around her for support, when the door suddenly flew open and crashed against the
wall. At the same moment, she felt the hand inside her mind suddenly clench itself into a fist. She screamed; it seemed that something screamed with her.

Stowe still had her around the waist, and they both went to the door and stared in horror at the monster shackled inside the next room. It was a writhing, shrieking insanity, a great, black, long-limbed creature with the face of a nightmare. Like a badger with its foot caught in a trap, it threw itself mindlessly against the ends of the cuffs, half-dragging Billy Smith along as it tried to make its way across the sagging floor toward them. Smith wrapped an arm around one of the supports in the wall, and they fought against each other.

She tried to go to him, but Harry Stowe’s grip tightened around her waist, holding her back. She fought him; for a moment, there were two raving creatures in the room. Then she saw the handle of the knife sticking out from Smith’s stomach, and she saw the blood.

She felt again for his hand inside her mind. It was there, waiting for her, and she grasped it as tightly as she could. Warmth flooded through her aching body.

I’m sorry. I did what I had to do
.

A sob caught in her throat.
Oh, Billy. Please don’t
leave me
.

You have to go now. Run. Don’t worry about me. I’ve always
known it would come to this. But you were right, you
know. There is goodness, after all
.

A picture of a wave filled her mind, a great and shining wall of water so tall it eclipsed the sky. At the same time she heard a low rumbling in the distance. She tried to look inside him then, tried to see the terrible thing he had been hiding from her, but it was gone, washed away by the flood. All she felt was love, so strong and so pure it drove the breath from her lungs.

She looked at him with wonder, and that was when the demon thing showed its face. For a single moment she got
the impression of a many-limbed beast, much larger than the little room they were in, its tentacles stretched across miles of open land, saucers like suction cups digging into the earth, a beaked maw like an octopus that snapped and lunged at them. It was a thing of pure hatred, pure evil, and she took an instinctive, half step back. But it could not reach them, and she finally understood. It was held captive by the same thing that gave it power; as long as the amulet still hung around Jeb Taylor’s neck, it could not escape his flesh and blood. Billy Smith had won.

The roar was getting louder. The floor had begun to shake beneath her feet.
Run, now. The flood is coming
.

The hand inside her mind seemed to flex again, offer a final, gentle caress, and then it was gone.