The Impaler (37 page)

Sam Markham wanted to sleep, too. To sleep and not pull back the curtains until he was sure his wife was waiting for him on the other side.

Cindy Smith reached out her arm and found nothing but air. Her head hurt and her throat was parched, and for a moment she had no idea where she was. She bolted upright and caught sight of the ghost light on the stage below—its single bulb casting shadows that ran across her body like prison bars. She sat there for a moment thinking—her memory, like a leaky faucet, coming back to her in drips.

She was on the second tier of the
Macbeth
set, behind the railing on the stage right side. That’s right. She and Edmund had come up here after kissing in the parking lot—but where was he? Cindy looked around and found her handbag beside her. She took out her cell phone. 3:42 a.m.

“Christ,” she sighed, closing her eyes.

It had been her idea, she remembered suddenly, guiltily—
she
who’d asked Edmund to open the theater so they could have some privacy in case any of the other students spotted them in the parking lot on the way home from the party.

The party,
Cindy said to herself.
There was a fight at the party.

But Cindy didn’t care about that, and instead fast-
forwarded to the memory of Edmund leading her up the stairs—the outline of his muscular back through his shirt glowing an eerie blue in the shadows from the ghost light. Then they were together, pawing at each other in the dark-ness—her back against the hard platform, the warmth of his skin, the sour smell of stage paint all around her. She had been drunk, but that wasn’t why she wanted him. She understood this even now, but thought it strange that Edmund wouldn’t take off his shirt even as she felt his hardness probing between her thighs.

Suddenly, Edmund froze—whispered something in her ear that sounded like
“arrest a gal”—
and then slid off. Cindy felt a wave of embarrassment and shame as she remembered how she all but begged him to continue “Come on,” she’d said, “put it inside me.” But now she couldn’t remember exactly what Edmund said next—mumbled something about stars and not having permission.

“
Permission?
” Cindy had slurred. “You’re too much of a gentleman.” Then came the fuzzy memory of them dress-ing—of
him
dressing
her—
and the warmth of his embrace as they drifted off to sleep. But Edmund hadn’t slept. Cindy knew that now.

“Edmund?” she whispered—but only her voice echoed back from the black. And suddenly Cindy was not only angry but also very afraid.

She stood up and grabbed her handbag, dashed down the escape steps behind the set, and felt her way through the wings to the side entrance. Her head was throbbing, her sense of balance off, but she found the doorknob and burst out into the night.

The cool air felt good on Cindy’s face—sobered her up but did nothing for her anger. She quickly descended the outside stairs and ran into the parking lot. Edmund’s pickup was gone, but her piece-of-shit Pontiac was right where she had left it before the show.

“Asshole,” she muttered—but once she was inside her car, her anger left her at once. On the passenger seat was a white rose, taken from her dressing room while she was asleep, she knew
.
Lying across it was a folded piece of notebook paper. She flicked on the dome light and read the note.

Cindy sat there for a moment, confused, reading the note over and over again. Edmund had written it in pencil, but it appeared as if he’d written another name first, then erased it and wrote Cindy instead. What was it?

Looks like the name begins with E,
Cindy thought, but she couldn’t make out the rest of it in the Pontiac’s dim dome light. But the note itself—what the hell was
that
about? And what kind of guy would leave a girl all alone in a darkened theater?

Cindy sat in the driver’s seat, playing over the night’s events in her mind until the windows of her Pontiac began to fog. Amy Pratt was right. There was something kind of creepy about Edmund Lambert. The note, the talk about things being what they seem—so strange, yes, but at the same time … well …

Cindy sighed and closed her eyes; tried to block out the realization of just how much that strangeness intrigued her—how much it
turned her on
. Jesus Christ, she almost had sex with Edmund Lambert after only a single date! This from the girl who in high school made her boyfriend wait over a year to get in her pants—and that was only because she was drunk and it was the senior prom and he begged her.

But now, tonight, it was she who had begged Edmund Lambert. What the fuck was going on with her? And what
was it about Edmund Lambert that made her act so unlike herself—made her throw herself at him just like that slut Amy Pratt would do?

Cindy opened her eyes and stared down at Edmund’s neat block-lettered print. She needed to get to bed and sleep off what had the potential to be a bitch of a hangover; she had to pull the lunch shift at Chili’s, too, before heading off to the show.

“He needs to be sure things are what they seem,” Cindy whispered, reading the note again. “Whatever the fuck that means.”

What things “seem” like,
a voice said in her head,
is that he ditched you in the theater. Didn’t wake you or stick around to walk to you to your car. That’s fucked up.

“But the note,” Cindy replied. “And the flower. It’s not like he just left me. Maybe he tried to wake me—”

Are you kidding? You’re gonna give him a pass on this?

“And the way he defended me at the party—”

Oh, my God! You’re truly one needy, pathetic bitch!

Cindy closed her eyes and told the voice in her head to fuck off. It was right: she should be furious with Edmund Lambert—but she wasn’t. And there was this odd feeling in the pit of her stomach: a dull sense of inevitability that at once both terrified and excited her—made her feel strangely liberated but at the same time like she was going bonkers inside a padded cell.

Damn right, crazy OCD bitch. Talking to yourself in your car at four a.m.—

“Out, out, damned spot!” Cindy screamed, her hands clawing at her tangled black hair—when suddenly in her mind she heard George Kiernan shout,
“That’s it!”

The General thought Edmund Lambert handled himself very well with Ereshkigal; for if in fact Cindy Smith
was
Ereshkigal, the General mustn’t allow himself to be seduced as the Prince had been all those years ago. True, that had been the beginning of Nergal’s love (if you could call it that) for the goddess; but it had also been the end of his rule in the land of the living. And it was to the land of the living that Prince Nergal wished to return; to once again take his throne in the sun and be worshipped.

But the Prince needed the General to return as much as the General needed the Prince. The General was the last of the doorways, and through him not only would Nergal become a living, breathing god again but also the General would be able to travel back and forth through the doorway to Hell. The General still wasn’t clear how it would all work in the end—such things were still beyond him—but it
would
work. He was sure of that. The Prince had revealed it to him in his visions; and before that, the equation had told him so, too. 9:3 or 3:1, depending on how you looked at it.

Yes, it was
how
you looked it that was the key. And thus,
in order to determine exactly how Ereshkigal fit into the equation, the General figured that the answer must lie in how he looked at her as well. He thought about this long and hard during the ride home from Greenville; but only when he pulled past the crumbling fieldstone columns at the head of his driveway did the answer, in a flash of insight, finally come to him.

Of course!
he thought.
Ereshkigal
had
to be part of the equation if one were to look at things from the other side of the doorway!
Only with Ereshkigal could the equation of 3:1 be balanced in Hell—the General, his mother, Ereshkigal on one side of the colon, the Prince on the other. And perhaps the colon itself was a symbol for the doorway, which meant the numbers indicate their relative positions after the Prince’s return.

But how would this work out in the end?

No need to worry about it now,
the General thought giddily. No, the most important thing was that Ereshkigal
did
fit into the equation after all. Indeed, the answer was so obvious that the General actually began to laugh at how stupid he’d been for not seeing it earlier.

“But I still need to be careful,” he whispered to himself as he entered the farmhouse. The concept of careful was inherent to the equation itself. The General already knew, for instance, that he would need to bring the throne through the doorway for his own protection. That was part of the legend. And so, he thought, he would also need the throne to protect his mother and carry her back while the Prince was busy with his return. That was the plan; that would be tricky enough—but now there was Ereshkigal, too. He would need to keep his meetings with her and his mother secret until the very last moment. The Prince was jealous of anyone talking to his princess; but even more so, the Prince was jealous of allegiance to anyone but him.

After all, wasn’t that why the Prince took Edmund Lam-
bert’s mother from him in the first place? So there would be no one left for the boy to worship other than the Prince?

At first, when the General began wearing the lion’s head, he’d hoped that—once the Prince saw how loyal he was—he would eventually grant Edmund Lambert’s mother freedom from Hell. Prince Nergal had never done such a thing be-fore—no, he was greedy and covetous of his souls—but perhaps, just perhaps, he might make an exception in the General’s case.

But as time went on, more and more the General began to think that the Prince would never allow such a thing. He needed an alternate plan; and even though he still wasn’t sure how it would all go down in the end, with the introduction of Ereshkigal the General felt confident that the Prince would have to yield to the 3:1
himself
.

Perhaps that was written in the stars, too,
the General thought.
Perhaps that was why the Prince never wanted to talk about Cindy Smith.

“No use getting ahead of myself,” the General whispered, and he went upstairs and showered. It would be daylight soon, and the Prince would be sleeping if he wasn’t already. The General had consulted with him before heading off to the cast party, upon which the Prince gave no indication that he was aware of Edmund’s secret meeting with his mother and Ereshkigal. Quite the opposite, the Prince’s visions indicated that he was excited about the cast party, and wanted the General to report back to him.

And so, once he was clean and dry, the General sat naked by his bedroom window until the sun was up and he could see no more stars in the sky. That meant the Prince was asleep. The General wanted to sleep, too, but first he needed to consult with his mother and Ereshkigal; needed to look for them in the swirling colors and confirm that his reading of the 3:1 was correct.

He went down into the Throne Room and stood before the lion’s head, listening until he felt like Edmund Lambert again.

Mama?
he called out in his mind.
Mama, are you there?

“Yes, Edmund,”
he heard her say after a moment.
“I’m here.”

Edmund removed the Prince’s head from the shelf and slipped it over his own. For a moment nothing happened; then all at once he felt as if the air was sucked from his lungs and his body was surging forward.

Thhwummp!—a rush of brightness—and the doorway was open.

There she was again! Radiant, floating in the swirling colors. She was alone this time, coming toward him, arms outstretched and smiling.

“C’est mieux d’oublier,” she said.

“I’ll never forget,” Edmund replied, taking her hands. He was about to kiss her when—flash-flash—his mother’s face changed. A low moaning seemed to rise up all around him, and suddenly Edmund realized he was staring into his grandfather’s eyes. “C’est mieux d’oublier,” the old man said, deep and guttural. Edmund was about to speak when—flash-flash—everything became the god Nergal.

“WHERE IS SHE?” he roared—hovering, wings spreading, teeth gnashing.

“No!” Edmund cried—flash-flash—and the moans became screams, louder and louder as Nergal grew until he filled the entire sky—a black orange sky above hordes of chanting soldiers; a smoking battlefield with lines of the impaled stretching as far as the eye could see. Edmund could smell it and taste it and feel it—

“WHERE IS SHE?”

Now Edmund could see the souls of the sacrificed rising toward Nergal’s mouth, snaking and twisting their way
around his monstrous fangs like tendrils of cigarette smoke. And there was his mother among them, screaming and pleading for help!

“Mama!” Edmund cried—but she could only call her son’s name one last time before slipping through the god’s teeth and disappearing into his throat.

“You can’t take her again!” Edmund screamed, but the Prince flapped his wings and knocked the young man backwards onto—

The cellar floor? Something hard and cold on his naked back. A glimpse of the throne through the lion’s mouth, of the headless body seated before him and—

No, he was up and moving now. Through a maze—a dark maze that brought him to the temple doors at Kutha.

“WHERE IS SHE?”

Now a whirring sound and wind—the god’s breath! Edmund could feel it and smell it! A hot smell like burning pennies—

And then he was in the workroom, staring through the lion’s mouth at the grinder on the workbench.