Darkness of the Soul (24 page)

Yet another reason to hate the design of this place over the floor plan of the previous building: the reception area moved straight into the freezer, which also served as the operating area. There was no sense of… of
transition
. Just bam, and you were there. Dicky had heard that it was supposedly to promote efficiency and to maximize space, but he just found it annoying. Then, of course, they put the restrooms behind that, so anyone who just needed to take a leak was treated to a tour of the freezers and possibly even an excellent view of some poor dead schmuck’s guts on a scale.

There shouldn’t have been any sounds coming from that direction at all, except the low hum of the refrigeration units themselves or maybe a toilet flushing. What he’d heard had been neither of those, and point in fact, he couldn’t hear the cooling system running at all. What he
could
hear sounded like the noise your showerhead makes when it’s no longer functioning properly: the steady drip, drip, drip that you didn’t notice in the daytime but which was liable to drive you out of your mind in the middle of the night.

Thinking of all the things it could be—the refrigeration being shut down and that being the sound of thawing chief among them—drove him forward, breaking the sense of paralysis and sending him into the freezer without much care or caution.

“Stephen! Are you back here? What the hell is going—”

“On,” was how he had meant to finish, but as he pushed through the swinging door and saw what had happened in the freezer—in
his
freezer—he found he couldn’t speak at all. The heat was part of it; back there, it was even worse than it had been up front, maybe as hot as 80 degrees. Then there was the smell. Hollis had spent much of his life around corpses in assorted stages of decay and so was quite used to the stench of decomposition, but never had he been hit with it in such force. It was like a physical blow that drove him backward, retching and leaving the remains of the waffles Marie had made for breakfast in a steaming heap on the floor.

The individual boxes on all the freezers had been torn open—not simply slid out of their casings as they were meant to be, but actually ripped open—and their contents disgorged onto the floor, leaving bodies strewn in piles around the room. It hadn’t occurred to Dicky how many extra corpses had been turning up lately until he saw that. And then there had been the other thing, the thing his mind still wouldn’t let him remember seeing, though he knew it was there.

You
didn’t
see
that.
Most
assuredly
not.
See
what?
He could hear a high-pitched giggle in his head, the sound of his sanity considering taking a nice long vacation, perhaps of the permanent type. As he backed out and pushed through the swinging door back into the reception area, he continued to repeat this mantra to himself, mumbling under his breath as he thought the words and trying to keep a rein on himself.

“Didn’t see what, sir?” a pleasant and not-unreasonable voice spoke from behind him, and Dicky Hollis shrieked and whirled around. What he saw was like a power surge deep in his brain, shorting out all the fuses and leaving nothing but a dark house behind. The final impossibility of the sight was simply too much for him to bear, too much with which to try to cope.

Before the circuits of his mind suffered from their permanent blowout, Hollis recognized the face of the man standing there; with so many people nagging him about this one, how could he have forgotten? But how does a corpse get back up, walk around to the front, steal your assistant’s clothes, and speak in such a reasonable voice? That the man had been dead was never a question in Dicky’s mind. The officers at the scene had pronounced him so, the paramedics had seconded that vote, and the hospital staff had made it unanimous, but still, there he was, as large as life and smiling.

Karim Alvat, who now thought of himself as Karesh Lintar, continued to smile as he advanced on the coroner with one of the scalpels from the precision set in his hand. Blood coated the tip of it and was spattered freely on the clothes he was wearing—hospital greens, a little too large but still serviceable. Lintar’s face fell when the man’s face went slack, finding in himself a great well of disappointment that Hollis had apparently been so unwilling to face him that he had short-circuited his own brain rather than face the reality of the situation.

“Tsk-tsk, my good sir. I was hoping you’d be more… sporting. Still, I suppose you’re not totally useless. Yet.”

Lintar’s smile widened as he advanced on Hollis, who was even now thinking of the beaches in Florida, of Marie running into the waves in the bikini he loved so much, the blue one that left only the barest hint to the imagination. His body lifted its arm in a wave, as his face broke into a sunny smile. Lintar remained unimpressed, as he drove the scalpel into Dicky’s eye socket. No scream came, but the life flowed out of the man as easily as it had his assistant, and Lintar drank from the fountain, laughing to himself as he did.

I’ll
not
fail
this
time.
Not
this
time
or
ever
again,
he thought as he drank his fill.

Chapter
22
 

Damien was unaware of the passage of time; he knew only that quite a lot of it had gone by. The place he had been since his brief moment of waking didn’t seem to have much concept of it, and the things he had seen and spoken to while there had all told him the same thing:
It
doesn’t
matter.
What
has
happened
has
already
happened,
and
what
will
happen
will
happen
when
it
is
time.

As for where he was, he couldn’t really make any guesses on that count either, except to count all of it as some kind of fever dream. He also supposed it was possible that he was dead and this was his purgatory, but he didn’t care to look at that possibility too hard and never asked.

The place—if it was really a place—had seemed empty when he had first arrived, but slowly detail had crept into the landscape. At first, it had been nothing but a white void, something akin to what he imagined the inside of a black hole might look like, but then streets had begun to form, followed by buildings and people. All of them had a familiar air, sparking a sense of déjà vu that he couldn’t quite lay a finger on at first. It came to him later that everything was from someplace he had seen or been during his childhood. Then it had occurred to him to ask one of the others why there was nothing from his adulthood there.

The girl he’d chosen to ask—a tall and leggy redhead who likewise looked familiar to him—had simply quirked her head, as if he’d asked one of the dumbest questions in the world, and told him, “These came before you were chosen.” Then she had turned away, heading down the street with a sexy grind going on in back. That tripped his memory, as he identified her as the babysitter he’d had in third grade, Lois Pasternak, whom he had always held a secret lust for that not even Tim or the others had known about.

He had spent what felt like days wandering in and out of the buildings—none of them were locked, even the ones that should have been—and talking to the people, tripping himself so often over memories that he had thought were forgotten that his head was practically swimming when the goddess came to him.

She came out of the ruins of the Delany House, one of the casinos that had been a favorite hangout of his when he’d been a teenager. It had good food any hour of the night and was the only arcade to have that Elvira pinball that they’d all been obsessed with. The place had shut down not too long before his eighteenth birthday, always with the promise that it was just a remodel and they’d be open “real soon, now.” The last time he’d checked, which had been just a month before his problems with Karim had started, the place was still closed.

What caught Damien’s attention about this person over any of the others was that she didn’t appear to be some figment of his past. She wasn’t his third-grade babysitter or some distant aunt he’d seen once, or his sixth-grade math tutor. She was just She, elemental and eternal, the sum of all of those memories and yet part of none of them.

Describing her, even holding focus on her, was next to impossible, because she incorporated elements of all the people he had known, blending them into a whole that was greater than any part individually could have hoped to aspire to be. She radiated light, casting deep shadows around her as she passed, and making it hard to look right at her, but Damien could still see the small, secret smile she wore as she approached.

He felt a tingle from inside and a rush of lust for this strange woman. Buried in him were all the feelings he had ever had for anyone, but what he felt for
her
was surpassing them all. He knew nothing about this woman except for the undisputable truth that he loved her. How he could feel such a thing, he didn’t know and couldn’t have explained; he only knew it to be true. When she reached him, he fell to his knees and confessed it to her.

She reached out one hand, laying it on his head and ruffling his hair, the way Sheila—the original, not Brokov—had used to do, laughing a little. When she spoke, her voice sounded layered somehow, like a concert with a really good reverb system that also provided a backup choir.

“I know. You prove it each day when you wake and again when you sleep. Every breath speaks of it to me.”

Damien couldn’t speak; his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth, and he felt that even if he somehow managed to pull it away, nothing but gibberish would have come from between his lips.

She just shook her head, as though she could read his thoughts and knew all that he would have said if he could. For all he knew, she probably could read his mind. It wouldn’t have surprised him at this point.

“I know. Just as I know that you don’t realize who and what I am. But part of you knows and recognizes. And you know what I am here for.”

Damien managed a nod but could not take his eyes off of her. He knew, all right. He knew whose Disciple he was now and understood that being there was his way of hiding from that. He’d buried himself in the memories of the past, digging deep so he couldn’t be found by his duty, wanting nothing more than to go back and stop this before it had all begun, let someone else shoulder the weight for a while. She was here to drag him out of the dream.

“I’m not dragging anyone, Damien.” Her voice, intruding on his thoughts as it had, startled him back to paying attention. “But you do have to choose. You can stay here, and I’ll bother you no more, but you must remember that all of this is just a dream. The real world is out there,” she gestured to the horizon with her arm, indicating the coming sunset, which triggered other notes of oddness in his soul, since until then, the sun had always stood as if at high noon. Then she lowered her arm slowly, her multicolored eyes looking at him with more compassion than he could bear, forcing him to drop his gaze. “And that world yet has need of you.”

Damien found his voice then, though it was shaken and lacking in the normal arrogance that bled from it. “Why?”

The woman shook her head, looking almost sad, the sadness of someone who has tried to teach a pupil in every way she knows and still continues to fail. “The servant of the
talu`shar
survives. The one of the blood remains unaware, still. There is none to guide him, and no longer enough time to bring another.”

Damien considered that and then nodded. Things were beginning to make a bit of sense now. It at least explained why he was still alive; if the janitor had lived—and how the hell had that happened anyway?—then the bargain he’d made with the magic was pretty much null and void. It didn’t get him out of the physical torture that doing that had earned him, but he was guaranteed to survive anyway.

“Send me home then.”

The woman—his light, his goddess—nodded once. “Do what you can.”

Damien tried to make some reply; what it was, he wasn’t sure, because he was enveloped in light before he could really say anything, and the light drove all other thoughts from his mind.

Chapter
23
 

11:30 am, December 20, 1999

The snow was falling hard by the time James Dolan pulled into the parking lot of the city morgue, a fact that brought a broad smile to his face. He was a big man, short and round with graying hair that hung to his shoulders, and so had been the obvious choice for the office Santa for years; nearly eight years’ worth of children had received presents from him come Christmastime at the Dolan Mortuary, and he had hoped not to disappoint this year’s crop with the lack of a white Christmas. If it stuck—and it appeared to have every intention of doing just that—he wouldn’t have to.

He dragged himself out of his Oldsmobile wagon, lamenting as always that they didn’t make enough affordable cars for people of his girth but not letting the little things bother him too much. Even the errand—picking up the remains of the elderly Mr. Jonas Starkweather for their interment next week—didn’t bother him overmuch. He had learned long ago that to dwell on those things was to eventually spoil all enjoyment in his life. It was with a whistle and a slight skip in his heavy step that he made his way across the lot toward the door.

The whistle drifted off and the skip stopped almost immediately once he pushed through the heavy door and into the reception area. At first glance, things appeared normal enough. Stephen’s chair was pushed back a bit as if he’d scooted away to get up to run some errand, his coffee cup sitting on the desk, close at hand to where the chair probably had been. Just grounds floated at the bottom of it, which James figured was a good indicator for where Stephen had gotten off to.