She Wakes (29 page)

    

    

    Her screams went on and on…

    Billie stood swaying, crying at the edge of the pit where they made her stand, weak, dizzy, in danger of falling herself-and she could see them writhing below as the big man lowered Michelle slowly down head-first, dangling, spinning at the end of the anchor rope, could see because they’d thrown a torch down ahead of her to stir them up and so Michelle would be able to watch them slide toward her, gliding angrily along one another’s backs to escape the burning torch, hissing on one another’s flesh. And then would be able to watch them strike and strike…

    …as they were doing now.

    He heard the screams. Dodgson began to run.

    The stairs were steep and there seemed to be hundreds of them. His breath came in short cold gasps. His lungs hurt and his feet felt heavy as lead. But the screams were shrill and final-sounding-wild, primitive. Someone was losing her mind up there. And dying. Both together.

    Billie?

    He couldn’t tell.

    He plunged ahead, stumbled, hauled himself up and continued, his legs pushed almost to the limit. The breeze became a cold wind as he climbed. Still he sweated with exertion and fear. Clouds moved by, blotting out a patch of stars. The screams continued, rising higher, a torture in themselves.

    Then they stopped abruptly.

    His soul felt colder than the wind.

    
Bitch,
he thought. He took a step.
Bitch.
The word became a cadence to him.

    He ground his teeth together and plodded upward as though slogging through hip-deep snow.

    He reached the top.

    He heard the wind hiss over the mountain.

    His legs trembled. His throat felt raw.

    The trail wound over the peak from here but there were no more steps to climb, thank god, just a gentle incline to the summit. He could see nothing, no one, ahead of him.

    He took a deep breath and started off at a slower pace. He thought it might pay to be careful now, to avoid tiring further. The screams had stopped in such a way that he knew instinctively whoever had uttered them was beyond his help. It came almost as a consolation to him. For someone terror had ended. For someone else, maybe not.

    The trail narrowed to his left past a bold outcropping of rock. From where he stood the summit was almost at eye level. Another few feet and he’d see what was up there-and whatever was up there would be able to see him. He shifted the stick to his right hand, the outside hand.

    He ducked behind the shelf of rock and waited. Listened.

    At first there was nothing. Only the wind and his own raspy breathing.

    And then the wind shifted.

    He heard a sound that was familiar, very familiar, but completely out of place here-the silky abrasion of flesh on flesh. He heard strained breathing mingled with a stifled sobbing.

    He knew the voice.

    
God damn them!

    Anger warred with elation. Elation because she was alive up there and fury at this abuse to her. And then he heard Lelia’s voice-soft, venomous, chanting.

    
Cunt. That's all you ever were to him. Cunt.

    Timed to the fleshy raping strokes.

    He stood and looked.

    She was standing on Billie’s hands.

    The huge body pumped at her. Long punishing strokes that pushed her back cruelly over the bare rock.

    Lelia’s eyes glittered.

    He climbed the rock. He made no attempt to hide from them.

    He walked to where they were and Lelia saw him and smiled and stepped back. The big man was oblivious, intent only on Billie. Billie’s eyes were closed and that was good. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

    He spread his legs to even his stance and took the heavy stick in both hands and brought it down on the man's heaving ribs with all the force he had in him, heard them crack and the man shriek in pain and when he raised it again he saw two bones pushing through the soft sluglike skin like the broken ribs of a wicker basket.

    The man looked up at Lelia-it seemed in astonishment to Dodgson-and then rolled off Billie’s body and Dodgson brought the stick down across his face, caved in the front of the wide high forehead and the nose and saw teeth fly off like pebbles around him. And when he lifted it away he saw the face crushed completely-eyes askew in their sockets, mouth, nose and chin oozing a foul dark liquid.

    The man rolled away and Dodgson twisted the stick around and clubbed him between the legs this time, a sound like chopping wood. The man doubled over, vomiting thick bloody bile. The back of his neck looked good to Dodgson. He raised the stick and swung it down and heard the junction crack, saw the head slide off at an angle, limp, broken, hanging loose over his left shoulder.

    The man crumbled and lay still.

    For a moment he felt a ringing victory-he felt triumph.

    Then he looked at Lelia and realized the man was nothing.

    He saw her smiling and knew that this was just one more horror to put him through, nothing more. Like the cats and Danny, like Xenia. Make him kill, yes. It was part of the plan, part of some awful unknowable ceremony, some mad blood passage.

    It was not nearly over between them. Not nearly.

    Yet she didn’t moved toward him. Didn’t speak.

    He waited a moment. Then he knelt down to Billie.

    She moaned, barely conscious.

    The man had been immense. There was no way of knowing how badly she’d been damaged. He saw the blood on her thighs.

    His rage was gone. He felt a chill pass over him.

    He looked up. Lelia was gone too.

    And suddenly he heard dogs howling-back along the stairs and all across the summit of the mountain. Some distant, some nearer. All of them moving closer.

    Not over.

    

    

    The change was full and complete in him.

    And it was not precisely Jordan Thayer Chase who rose off the tiled mosaic in the House of Masks and walked through the entranceway out through the winding paths of the city.

    This new man glowed with a strange inner light. Her dogs shied away from him.

    He sensed his way to her unerringly. He walked the long maze of streets and began to climb the processional steps up the mountain. Inside he felt the power of many suns in many times and places. They had worshipped power like this flowing out of stars a billion miles away and would again, many billions of miles away from that. As once they had here. And he knew what he had been sent to do if not what had sent him. That he would never know.

    But the concept was old as time. The joining of the two-it was the figure of the universe.

    Man and woman. Brother and sister. Sun and moon. Life and death.

    And now one hard, rapacious woman as powerful as he had died and iriumed and tapped a vein of purest fear, primal as the cave. Whether by in accident, chance, or by the design of an anemic corrupted earth seeking and thrust into violent life again she had found that vein and drunk deeply.

    Now as always, fear had its counterpart-death had its counterpart. Itach fell victim to the other. The circle closed again.

    He walked the steps, a man no longer young, but felt no strain. The dogs yelped-scalded-and ran away from him.

    In some hidden part of him was the knowledge that had been with him since the beginning-that he would die here. But as someone had told him once, in another life, in another world entirely, there were far worse places to do that. He stalked her up the mountain.

    The dogs had scented them.

    He pulled Billie under a shelf of rock so that at least they couldn’t hit her from behind and then waited, holding tightly to the heavy stick, palms sweating into the rough dry wood.

    The baying stopped. They were near now. He could hear scuffling, paws scrabbling against bare rock.

    There.

    He could see eyes glowing in front of him and wished for fire. But there was no fire.

    He screamed-ferociously, he hoped.

    He darted out into them, swinging the stick wildly, sounding to himself like some great choking bear.

    He hoped they wouldn’t smell the fear on him.

    They scattered.

    He watched them lope across the mountain. He was amazed. Had he done that?

    He went back to her. She was sitting up, staring at him. She said his name.

    “Can you walk?”

    She nodded.

    They had to get away from here. Someplace he could defend. Someplace with just one entrance.

    “You sure?’

    “Yes.”

    “Okay.” He slipped off his sweater and gave it to her. He looked at her, at the bruises and the blood, as she put it on. Something gave inside him. She saw it happen.

    “Later,” she said. ‘Tell me later.”

    “When we’re out of this.”

    “Yes.”

    He gazed out into the night. He could see eyes glinting a few yards away.

    “They’re out there. Make lots of noise, all right?’

    He squeezed her hand.

    

    

    Then they were up and out, screaming, hollering, running around the side of the mountain while his eyes strained in the meager light to find some sort of break in the rock below, great dark shapes chasing after them, growling, snapping at them from behind and then bolting away as he turned and swung at them, hesitating and then coming back fast. He felt something grip his pants leg. It almost tripped him. He turned and kicked, felt himself connect and heard the big dog yelp.

    She was ahead of him now and he ran after her, searching the mountainside. Down below on the far side of the mountain he saw a boat anchored in a tiny inlet-it barely had time to register. And then he saw a place a few feet down along a jagged wash. Some sort of hole. He called her.

    She turned.

    He saw the dog go after her, rushing past him, snarling. He moved fast, cracked it across the shoulder with the stick. The dog jumped and bounded away. He pulled her toward him and then down the few steps to the hole. She stumbled and they nearly went down the mountain. He caught himself and shoved her out ahead of him into it, and then she was safe inside. He leapt after her.

    Jaws clamped hard on his leg, oh his calf just above the ankle.

    He fell, reached forward to the edge of the hole and howled, more in fear than in pain because there wasn’t much pain yet, just the sickening feeling of being drawn back, the unreal dreamlike agony of being hauled back by his own tom flesh from that place of safety. He saw her reach for him, the pale white palm of her hand.

    Too far!

    He whirled and slashed with the stick, caught the dog across the muzzle. Blood and spittle flew over him. He saw the mad red-rimmed eyes. The dog yelped and let go. He tried to pull the leg up so he could crawl inside but the leg wouldn’t go, something was wrong there-and then he did feel pain, a rocketburst of pain as a second pair of jaws replaced the first, came down on the very same spot and another dog hit him in the knee. He felt bone grind against bone. He screamed and struck out wildly.

    He felt the hard-soft thud of contact once, twice, then three times and suddenly he was free again and his hand went out to her-and she’d angled herself out closer by then. Her grip was strong as he hauled himself toward her.

    Then she screamed too.

    The hand slid away, slowly, in slow motion-and he didn’t understand, he couldn’t hold on to it.

    He saw pity and terror on her face, just for a moment.

    Then her face pulled back too and he strained and struggled to the edge of the hole and peered in, shouted her name, and saw her sliding down, sliding away from him into the blackness in the depths of the mountain.

    

    

    The walls were cold and slick, smooth, and she could get no purchase with her fingers-she felt the fingernails break as she clawed the cool granite surface, as the hands drew her down and down into the damp-smelling darkness. They were Lelia’s hands, she’d felt them before, she knew them. She was in some ancient cistern, going down forty feet or more while the smooth hard stone bruised and scraped at her, became colder, being dragged over wet slick steps cut thousands of years ago into the living rock. With a cry of anger and despair she knew it to be her grave.

    Hands jerked her around a comer and the dark sky blotted away entirely so that now she plunged through a world of darkest night and she turned and bent forward at the waist, not minding the bright stabs of pain as the steps bruised her hip and thigh. She swung hard with her fists at what dragged her, swung where the body should be, the face, the hands. There was nothing.

    Nothing. The faint smell of ether. And the dragging.

    She screamed his name. The walls gave back no echo. She heard the thing that was Lelia crooning to her.

    Come. Come now.

    She curled herself into a ball to cushion herself against the jolting- and then the stairs were gone and there was only a long smooth slide, the walls around her as though the earth itself were bathed in a chilling sweat and then that stopped too.

    The hands released her.

    She lay in a shallow pool of water, all around her a blinding, stifling darkness and for a moment there was silence, just the faintest of scraping sounds up ahead where she had come from-where Dodgson was-and then she felt the long black fingernails tear down through his sweater. She felt them on her breasts, poised there.