The Impaler (47 page)

“C’est mieux d’oublier,”
he heard her say, and the General understood that the Prince had been the true path all along. Ereshkigal was the enemy. Ereshkigal had tried to trick them. And the Prince had brought her to the attic, to the threshold of the doorway to devour her into his spirit just as he had devoured Edmund Lambert and his mother; just as he most certainly would devour the General. The nine and the three, the return, the dots connected to make a new equa-tion—an equation that the General could not have possibly understood until now.

“My body is the doorway,” said the General, said the Prince.

And then he bit into her again.

Markham closed his fingers around the cold steel knob and pushed. The door cracked open. The Impaler, in his haste, had forgotten to lock it.
Thank God!

He stepped cautiously from the cellar into a pool of blood. There was blood everywhere—on the walls; footprints and a thick smear tracking away from the cellar door as if someone had been dragged across the kitchen floor.
Not Schaap,
he thought.
No, this mess leads to someone else!

He took another step, wincing as his shoes peeled from the linoleum—then he heard a dull
thwump
from above his head. He stopped and listened, then saw the handguns on the kitchen counter: FBI issue, .40-caliber Glock 22s. His own and Andy Schaap’s.

Markham traded his hammer for the guns, checked the ammo, and followed the blood trail from the kitchen into the hallway. Now he could hear whimpering and squealing coming from the second floor. He mounted the staircase—when suddenly a deafening roar sent a shiver through his veins.

“Please, God, no!”
the woman screamed, and Markham flew up the stairs like a ghost—kept his ears trained on the
cacophony of crying and growling and roaring and quickly negotiated his way through the darkened upstairs hallway.

He ended up in one of the bedrooms; saw light coming from the closet and went for it. He stood there for a moment, panting in the doorway as he gazed down the long, narrow passage to the door at the far end—open, light streaming downwards, and more stairs. They were in the attic.

Markham swallowed hard—could hear muffled sobs and grunting and then the word
“Ereshkigal”
spoken in that low, growling voice.

Ereshkigal,
he thought.
The Nergal myth—the rape of the goddess in the Underworld!

In the next moment he was bounding up the stairs with his pistols thrust out before him like an outlaw. The old boards creaked noisily beneath his feet, but what greeted him in the attic froze him dead in his tracks.

It was a young man—naked, bloody, and impaled on a stake that had been driven into the attic floor. There was a large, gaping hole in the ceiling, and the young man’s neck had been broken—his head tied back so that his lifeless eyes stared toward the stars. On his chest, in streaks of blood still shiny, the words I HAVE RETURNED had been carved into his flesh.

Markham, his veins running cold, digested the entirety of the scene almost at once—but it was still enough time for the Impaler to react.

Another scream, and at the far end of the attic, on the other side of the impaled young man, Markham saw move-ment—a blur of bloody-sweaty muscles that glistened in the light from the single overhead bulb.

The Impaler growled and gnashed his teeth.

Then he fired.

The first shot burst through the dead man’s side—missed Markham’s head by inches, and buried itself in the wall behind him. Markham dropped to his stomach and slid back-
wards down the stairs—returned fire blindly as two more bullets whizzed past him. The Impaler kept firing—three more shots and the woman began screaming hysterically. Then the sound of movement—creaking and something falling—and Markham peeked his head over the top step.

A ladder lay on the attic floor.

The Impaler was gone.

Markham sprang to his feet—could hear footsteps above his head as he covered himself with his pistols. He skirted around the impaled young man, around the hole in the roof, and headed for the girl. She was on the floor, naked and sobbing and curled up in the fetal position near a stack of trunks—her face, her arms and legs, almost her entire body a glistening crimson.

Markham, his eyes darting back and forth from the hole in the ceiling, was about to speak, when two more shots from the Impaler rained down on him. He dove to the floor, knocked over an old dressing dummy and covered the young woman. More bullets buried themselves in the dummy’s heavy torso, while others popped and splintered the exposed wood beams on the wall behind him.

A brief silence, and then Markham heard the Impaler scrambling across the roof. He fired both pistols, sending a trail of bullets through the attic ceiling in the direction of the footsteps—then a loud thump at the other end of the house.

Markham paused, wondering for a microsecond how many bullets he had left. Fully loaded, his Glocks held sixteen rounds apiece. If the Impaler was using his M9 Beretta—well, Sam Markham couldn’t remember how many rounds that model held.

“Please, help me,” the young woman whimpered.

“Are you wounded?” Markham asked her. “Are you shot?”

“It was Edmund Lambert,” she sobbed. “It was Edmund….”

Markham took off his jacket and covered her. She had
bite marks on her neck and shoulders; large patches of flesh missing from her breasts, too. She was bleeding badly, but he could tell for the time being she was going to be okay. She would
have
to be.

“What’s your name?” Markham asked.

“Cindy Smith.”

“Sam Markham, FBI,” he said, checking his pistols. “Hold my jacket against your chest to slow the bleeding. You’re going to be fine.”

“It was Edmund Lambert! He killed Bradley—”

“I need you to find a phone, Cindy Smith,” Markham said, tucking the pistols into the small of his back. “Call 911. Wait until I’m gone, then—”

“Don’t leave me!” the girl cried, reaching for his leg—but Markham ignored her and replaced the ladder.

“I need you to be strong,” he said. “Call 911—the kitchen. I saw a phone in the kitchen downstairs. You understand me?”

“No—he’ll come back for me!”

Markham stepped onto the ladder. “All right, stay put,” he shouted as he climbed. “You’ll be safe here. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

“Don’t leave me!”

But Markham was already at the top of the ladder. He poked his gun out of the hole and stepped up onto the roof as the girl went on screaming beneath him.

He was in the middle of nowhere; didn’t know which way to turn—the silvery farmland stretching out for what seemed like miles in every direction—when suddenly he heard the sound of a car starting behind him.

Markham scrambled over the roof peak and headed to the other side of the house—jumped onto the porch overhang just as the headlights of the Impaler’s pickup began backing away from him down the driveway.

Markham leaped from the porch roof and fired after the
truck—broke a headlight on the first shot, then heard the windshield shatter and the
hiss-pop
of the radiator bursting as he emptied one of the pistols. He let it fall in the dirt and began firing with the other.

He’s going to get away,
he thought—when unexpectedly the truck spun out and plowed backwards into one of the old tobacco sheds.

The weathered boards crumbled down and bounced off the hood as the truck came to a stop—its one remaining headlight cutting through the swirling dust like a laser beam. Markham ran for it, his stomach in his throat, as the old Ford’s engine whined painfully, its tires spinning in the dirt.

He fired one last time—heard a loud crack—and then everything cut off into a long, menacing hiss.

Markham slowed as he drew closer to the shed; took cover behind some remaining wall planks and checked his pistol.

The clip was empty. Only one bullet left in the chamber.

He pointed his gun at the driver’s side door and shouted, “FBI! Come out with your hands up!” His heart was pounding. He was a dead man if the Impaler called his bluff and decided to shoot it out with him. But there was nothing, no sound at all except for the hissy sputtering of the F-150’s radiator.

Markham approached the driver’s side door, leveled his gun, and quickly peered inside. The pickup’s interior light was on, and he could see blood on the front seat—but the passenger door was open, the Impaler nowhere in sight.

Markham dropped his head and ducked behind the truck bed for cover. Silence—only the crickets, his breathing and the faint hissing of the truck’s radiator dying out—when suddenly, he heard what sounded like boards cracking inside the shed.

He’s trying to break out the back,
Markham thought. He craned his neck—peered over the truck bed into the dark-
ness—and saw the outline of the missing boards against the moonlight. No sign of the Impaler.

He squatted back down—closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted, frightened and feeling foolish. “There’s nowhere for you to run now, Edmund Lambert!”

You sure that’s his name?
a voice taunted in his head.
Edmund Lambert. You sure that’s what the girl said?

Another board—
Crack!—
then a scraping sound.

Markham swallowed hard, and then he was moving, covering himself as he circled around to the rear of the tobacco shed.

C rack!

Markham stopped, listening.

Silence again, only his breathing.

He sidled along the wall—thought he heard a thumping from around the corner—and stopped short at the rear of the shed. He could see the field stretching out in the distance beyond the trees; could hear nothing now but his heart throbbing in his ears. The Impaler was on the other side of the wall—he was sure of it—and in a burst of adrenaline, he wheeled around the corner and dropped to his knees.

Nothing.

Markham rose to his feet, saw where the Impaler had broken through the rear of the shed, and moved away from the wall. There was an old oak tree only a few yards away. The Impaler might be behind it—but he hadn’t heard any footsteps in the dry grass.

And then Markham understood.

He turned just in time to see the Impaler jumping from the low roof of the overhang. Instinctively he raised his gun, but the Impaler came down on him hard, his forearm slamming into Markham’s face as the gun went off.

Then they fell together to the ground.

Now he is Edmund Lambert again, a boy on the road holding hands between the General and the Prince. He knows they are there but makes no attempt to look at them; understands that he is too small to see their faces, and keeps his eyes fixed on the light in the distance as they escort him past the lines of the impaled.

But the boy’s steps are their steps. Giant steps. And before the boy can wonder at it he has reached the temple doors at Kutha.

The Prince and the General leave him. The boy feels their hands slip away.

Now he is alone. Now there is only his mother, standing with her arms outstretched high above him at the top of the stairs—a silhouette in the temple doorway with the light of a billion stars behind her.

“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me,” she says.

“It’s not my fault,” the boy replies. “I only did what they told me.”

“C’est mieux d’oublier,”
another voice echoes from
somewhere, and his mother beckons him, disappearing slowly into the light.

Now the boy is climbing the stairs—black stairs, like rows of forgotten pictures in a yearbook—when all at once, it seems, he is standing in the doorway.

But the boy hesitates, unsure if he should enter. He hears the other voice again—a man’s voice that reminds him of his own—but cannot make out what it’s saying. Two words, only two words—but the voice is behind him now, far away in the void at the bottom of the stairs.

It doesn’t matter, the boy thinks.

And then he steps forward into an attic full of stars.

Markham was sure he’d lost consciousness; was vaguely aware of a loud explosion in front of his face—but then the pain, in a burst of bloodred stars, shot across his nose and sent him flying backwards. Something happened next—blurry movement and a loud buzzing as the sky threatened to iris into black—and then the taste of blood in his throat brought him back, started him coughing.

He rolled onto his stomach, shook the cobwebs from his skull, and spat into the grass. The buzzing in his ears was replaced by ringing, and something whispered of a blink forward in time—how long a blink, he wasn’t sure. One part of his brain told him his nose was broken, while another part registered his gun lying a few feet away. Instinctively he crawled toward it, his hand reaching for the warm barrel when suddenly, underneath the ringing, he thought he heard the footsteps crunching in the grass.

And talking? Did I just hear someone talking?

Markham turned and saw the Impaler staggering out into the field beyond the old oak tree. He grabbed his gun and rose on all fours. A wave of pain at the bridge of his nose
sent him reeling, but he found his feet and stumbled toward the tree—took cover and peered around it to discover the Im-paler had slowed. He could see him clearly now in the open field—naked, about thirty yards away, his muscular flesh a milky gray in the moonlight. He was unarmed.

Markham whirled from around the tree, his empty gun trained on the man’s back. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” he shouted, but the Impaler seemed to ignore him—staggered a few more steps and then sank to his knees.

Markham lowered his gun and watched in fascination as the man in the field began clawing upwards at the open air. He struggled to stand; and when he did, he lifted his left foot and dropped it quickly. He repeated the motion with his right and then his left again, stepping in place over and over as if he were trying to climb an invisible staircase. Then all at once he stopped, stood motionless, and fell face-first into the grass.