House of Corruption (38 page)

“Lasha!” Reynard cried. She did not move. “Lasha!”

“In the name of God the all-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” Savoy shouted, raising the cross. “
Ecce crucem domine, fúgite partes advérsae
...
!
”

Grant leaped to his feet as bodies stood from their slabs. He fired the rifle and disintegrated the closest, its spine blowing in half. The second swatted out with a bony hand at the barrel. Grant pulled the rifle free, pumped the lever, and fired again. The dead thing expelled its rotten entrails and folded in half. The next Grant struck across the face with the rifle’s butt, dislocating its jaw. More corpses filled the gap with vacant eyes and reaching arms, their flesh sliding off exposed bones. Grant stepped back up the steps in a forced retreat.

“...May God cast out that evil spirit,” Savoy cried as more bodies rose around him. “Impart a portion of His Spirit upon me, oh sinner that I am, that I may serve He who suffered...”

The dead kept coming.

“Depart! I declare you, Lucinda Carlovec, exorcised of the evil spirit that inhabits you! I condemn that diabolical dragon to eternal fire with—!”

Two corpses grasped Savoy’s face, their fingers smothering his mouth, wrapping around his throat. He could not move, fixed upon the remains of his old friend Ernst Stronheim. His remains squeezed his throat with one hand, clutching Savoy’s wrist with the other. It squeezed his wrist until Savoy’s hand opened and the cross fell away and was lost. Reynard grabbed Stronheim’s corpse and, with the crowbar, crushed in its skull like old pottery. Grant threw the second attacker off and fired into its ruined stomach, tearing it apart.

Dead gathered from all sides and surged toward them, pressing, reaching, slapping at their weapons, clawing at their faces.

Lucinda resumed her singing. A brackish glow materialized between the three standing-stones—faint at first, cancerous—then folded in on itself. The dark light folded again and again until it seemed the air might tear open and Hell itself would appear on the other side. Lucinda’s voice grew louder. The atmosphere of the grotto, once stale and hot and heavy, began to move. Sconce fires snapped, the walls dancing with shadow. Smoke and dust rushed into the center of the stones. 

One mummified skeleton knocked Savoy down and a host of dead rushed in to smother him. Grant caught him under his shoulders, lifted him to his feet and they raced for the archway leading to the boiler room; Reynard refused to leave, hacking with the crowbar, raging. Bodies piled upon him and, with a shove, he too made a stumbling retreat up the steps.

“Your tokens are worthless!” Reynard shouted.

“Do not blaspheme,” Savoy snapped. “She is immune to it. I have no real artifact, no medal. She disregards my cross, and I could not get close enough to touch her. She has seen my heart, my damned foolish heart. She is
immune
!”

“How is this possible?” Grant asked.

“That black water, those stones,” Savoy said. “The very weave and shape of this unholy place grants her necromancy. So many poor spirits are trapped in this house...she taps that energy to purge the penanggalen from her body—using Lasha, the host of her unclean sacrament.”

Shambling dead broke through the gated doorways from burrows cached underground. Dozens upon dozens of bodies with any degree of shape and form added to the ranks, silent, relentless, drawing closer. Down below, the dark light between the stones solidified.

Savoy strained to think.
Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it ... Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: The Cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it
...

Ordinary means would not serve. No rifles or fists or crowbars. They could destroy every glass coffin they found, kill the penanggalan’s hosts, delay its work, but the entity itself was beyond their efforts. She had swung wide a door that needed to be shut. The unhappy spirits trapped in Carlovec Manor needed it shut.

That ye may put difference between unclean and clean.

The Cup.

Between unclean and clean
.

Some doors need to be shut
.

“I must get down to that pool,” he said.

“That was the general idea,” Reynard said.

“You must get me through!”

Reynard snatched Savoy’s rifle and he and Grant advanced, confronting the first line of bodies. Their bullets spent, the men used the weapons like clubs. They hacked and pushed and plowed a slow path through the crowd, Savoy close behind. They broke through bone and desiccated flesh. For every dead body that fell aside, two or three took its place.

Lucinda’s chanting grew to a fevered pitch, words from a time when ancient men toyed with deep mysteries—forbidden, unhealthy knowledge uncovered by Grandfather Carlovec in his quest to solve the unsolvable. She embraced it without restraint. Dark light swept off the stones and scattered rice and herbs at her feet. It filled into her nostrils until her lungs labored to inhale it.

She raised her face. The penanggalan strained beneath her skin. She opened her mouth to reveal rows of needle-like teeth. Hideous shades of others’ faces rolled across her own: Lucinda, Kiria, Edward Tukebote, Frederick Burlington, whores and servants, policemen and ladies, rich and common, black and brown and white and more.

Take it from me
, she cried in an ancient tongue.
Pluck the evil spirit into this girl.
Let the spirits have it, feast upon it, suck its poison from her marrow and let it be gone forever
.

Then another voice, immensely loud, cried out:

“
Lucinda!
”

Dark light flittered away like smoke. The room rippled with a shifting of energy as the dead paused in their march, quivered, and dropped to the floor. Bones and sinews and tendon collapsed. Fresher shapes burst apart like rotten fruit. All fell like discarded puppets, the air thick with dust and noxious fumes.

Wilhem Carlovec had arrived.

He was gray and thin and haggard, his clothes rags upon his bones. His ashen skin hung like old paper, the veins in his neck dark and swollen. His eyes were large and moist, wild, and by his look it took every ounce of will to keep his sinews connected and moving. Yet he descended the steps, his eyes ever focused on Kiria’s face. Man and wife and daughter locked gazes.

“Give her back to me,” he demanded.

“What does it matter?” she said. “Your work is finished.”

“It is.”

“You have taken it?”

“I have.” He touched against the flesh of his neck, the veins bulging. “But I would
stop
just where you are,” he said to the three men as they descended the steps to the far side of the pool. “I may not agree with my wife’s...methods...but she will complete the ritual.” He glared at Lucinda. “That girl cannot be your sacrifice. She must be your shroud. Find someone else. I will not endure my daughter’s face in my bed.”

“You have done it,” Lucinda said. “Your cure.” Her voice deepened. She rose, the bloody mandau still gripped in her hand. “We are free, after all we have suffered.”

He laughed. “You are a fool.”

“I...”

“When did I
ever
say I wanted a cure?”

He clenched his hands. A faint tremor coursed from the muscles of his arms to his shoulders, tightening his neck. The veins of his neck and exposed chest darkened even further, like burnt silver. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Silver filled his eyes. His shoulders added bulk and width. Blood seeped from the ends of his fingers.

“What have you done?” Savoy asked.

“Dominion,” Wilhem said. His muscles shifted. “You once claimed the curse was a matter of mind and body and—” He twitched, gasped. “When it was clear Monsieur LaCroix’s cycle had been altered...I read everything you wrote, attended every lecture. Your friend Stronheim was more than happy to share what he knew once the right...persuasion...was applied.”

“Damn you.”

“A man’s will can only...” More pain came, doubling him over. “...Can only do so much. It required a fundamental change of my body. When I watched Reynard on the front lawn, how he called the animal by will alone...” He seized, the tremor stiffening his back. Bloody foam spilled from his mouth. “...Magnificent.”

“I was an animal,” Reynard said.

“You were a god.”

Wilhem fell to his knees. Bone cracked like iron knuckles snapping. His shoulders slid back and forced his head forward. He groaned, smiling too many teeth. Sharp, grey hair erupted from the back of his neck and hands as the stitching of his sleeves begin to fail. He smiled as if the pain brought him indescribable pleasure.

Lucinda watched, horrified. “You promised.”

“You sold your soul to Satan,” he said, “because you hate me. I never shared my true purpose, because I hate you.” He doubled over, his jaw sliding from its socket. “We are both...monsters.”

Lucinda raised her hands to her eyes, to the sky. She screamed as her husband transformed before her, her sound filling the grotto with the magnitude of her despair. The smooth surface of the black pool rippled. Older corpses, barely hanging together by fibrous threads, fell apart with gasps.

“
I did this for you
!” she shrieked.

Wilhem stood at his full height. The Beast inside him fought to shift every muscle, stretch every tendon to bursting. When he lifted his head he was no longer a man or an animal, but a madman’s conception of a wolf. Lucinda watched her husband transform with horror.

Wilhem lurched at her, his claws extended.

She swung the mandau—

—and Wilhem’s head slid off his shoulders.

His body dropped as his transformation reversed, the beast dissolving from his skin.

The sword clattered to the floor. Lucinda gaped at her quivering hands, shuddering. She fell to her knees weeping, hysterical, clutching at her husband’s body as his dark blood pumped across her gown. She cradled his corpse and plunged her teeth into the crook of his neck between shoulder and throat. With a spasm she heaved like a snake—once, twice, gurgling. His bleeding slowed and, in moments, ceased altogether.

“Take her,” Savoy said. Grant ran to the side of the pool. He touched Lasha’s neck and nodded. She was alive. He scooped her unconscious body into his arms. “You remember the explosives?” Savoy asked.

“Yes.”

“Bring this cursed house down.”

“You must be joking.”

Savoy smiled. “You should know me better by now.”

“What about you?”

“This place must be made clean.”

Lucinda lifted her bloody mouth from Wilhem’s neck and her head bobbed, loosening from her shoulders. The color in Kiria’s dark hair bleached into white. The skin of her colorless head tightened against her skull, deepening the contours of teeth and jawline and eyesocket.

“We have no time,” Savoy said. “She will consume her husband as she consumed her daughter. I daresay she cannot help herself.” He knelt by the black pool. “I must purify this unholy place. Stronheim knew it was the only way. He knew I could do it.”

“Mister LaCroix?” Grant asked.

Reynard imagined Lasha seven years old again, filled with the love of those ordinary moments of arguing and laughter and daily habits. He wanted to hear her laugh, yell, complain. He wanted to sip a warm sherry on the veranda while sunset blazed off the lake, to taste Eleanor’s cooking, to smell the trees. He wanted so many things, so many things long gone.

Yet Lasha was alive. Alive. That was enough.

“Take care of her,” he said to Grant.

Grant raced up the steps, Lasha cradled in his arms.

38

Lucinda heaved with a sound like drowning.

On the far side of the pool, Savoy motioned the cross with his right hand over the water. “I bless this water in the Name of Our Lord,” he started, “Thy only Begotten Son—”

The flesh at Lucinda’s neck split like old rags and her head slid from Kiria’s shoulders. It lifted into the air, sliding from her neck its dripping, worm-like spine. It was not Lucinda or Kiria or any of the innumerable hosts she had taken—only the penanggalan. The creature rose higher into the air and flew, snaking around the standing stones, all shrieking head and scorpion spine. Its jaw snapped with a clack of sharp teeth.

It dove sharply as if to gnash at Savoy’s impudence. He raised up the cross, confident, and the thing hissed and slid away. It coiled around the standing stones, circling once, and dropped toward Wilhem’s body. Like a tentacle the spine slid into the stump of his neck with a gurgle of brackish liquid.

“We invoke upon this water,” Savoy said, “the Name of Him Who suffered, Who was crucified, Who arose from the dead, Who sits at the right hand...”

The head upon Wilhem’s shoulders knit flesh to flesh and tendons merged, nerves connected and muscles drew taut. The skin on Lucinda’s face flushed from white to crimson with the onset of flowing blood. With a wide gasp she breathed again, choking and spitting as if tasting air after a deep swim, but soon her breathing calmed and grew strong. As she struggled to regain his feet her long hair, now iron gray, hung over Wilhem’s face as the body’s hidden knowledge mimicked his contours. It was the black eyes that revealed the abomination: Man and woman, alive and dead.

“May all fevers,” Savoy said, touching the water with his finger, “every evil spirit, and all maladies...” The water began to shift. Bare, chalk-white faces stared up from just beneath the surface. Reynard, standing behind him, could not help but look. “...Every evil spirit, all maladies be put to flight—”

“I warned you,” Lucinda said with Wilhem’s voice.

“...By him who is anointed with it...”

“Why do none of you listen?”

“...May that which is impure, be made whole...”

“Why must you hurt me?”

“...May that which is unclean, be made clean....”

“
Stop!
”

Lucinda started toward them, reaching down to take the mandau in his hand—then she gasped. She gazed at her husband’s body, at his arms and stomach and legs, her expression filled with a new terror. The mandau fell to the floor. Reynard caught the familiar whiff of scent as the body began its inexorable movement to madness.