Twisted (26 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Grove kept his eyes closed, his wrists screaming in pain from the ropes. He could smell the killer looming closer. It was a skunky, rank odor—like rotting meat left in a root cellar for years and years. He felt his upper body being jostled, the bonds loosening around his wrists. He felt his shoulders slip free of the handcar.
He fell with a thump—still feigning unconsciousness—down onto the fossilized rail bed. He saw stars. He felt his wrists screaming with pain, as they were once again yanked over his head. The rain had picked up. Grove could feel it on his face. It braced him and gave him strength to wait for the right moment ... before the ropes were tied to the track ... before this went too far ... the element of surprise ... the right moment to strike.
Now he could hear Doerr fiddling with something metallic. It sounded like knives and forks clanking in a metal container. Grove very cautiously cracked open on eye and peered up to his right. He saw an upside-down Michael Doerr assembling instruments. He had a pair of delicate, stainless steel, bird-beak pliers—a dental extractor used to pull teeth—and a six-inch surgical scalpel with a spoon-shaped blade. At a glance the latter instrument looked like a small ice cream scoop. It took Grove a moment to figure out its purpose.
Grove decided it was time to strike. He suddenly yanked with all his might on the loose wrist ropes, and at the same time kicked out at Doerr's legs—
—and nothing happened.
Nothing whatsoever happened because Grove was almost completely paralyzed by the aftereffects of the drug, and all he had done was let out a little gasp of effort, which merely alerted Doerr to the fact that Grove was conscious now. The killer froze for a moment, gazing down at Grove with those rotting pumpkin eyes. Doerr's black rictus of a mouth spread into either a smile or a grimace—it was impossible to tell anymore—as he selected the scoop-shaped scalpel. Grove looked up at the scalpel, then up into the rheumy, red eyes of the psychopath. “Go to hell,” Grove said then in a flat, resolved tone.
Five hundred yards to the south, the windwall moaned balefully ...
. . . as the creature that was once called Michael Doerr began removing Grove's eyeball.
22
The human eye, oddly enough, is an incredibly tough organ—not unlike the stalk of an ironweed—and the Holy Ghost had to resort to pressing a boot down against the man's chest for leverage, as though worrying a recalcitrant root out of the ground. It took quite a while just to work the razor-sharp edge of the scalpel down into the gap between the skull and the eyelid. The FBI man wailed a watery, strangled cry in the darkness that sounded like a spring calf being slaughtered—the anesthesia almost completely worn off by that point—and blood streaked down the man's face in dark rivulets.
The sound of the man's cry energized the Holy Ghost. Even in the midst of the closing eye wall, it was almost sensual, the way the scream worked on the entity's central nervous system, despite the laborious aspect to this part of the ritual. Older folks gave up eyes much easier. A middle-aged man like this still had a lot of bone density and tissue. Extracting
this
eye would be a chore, but the Holy Ghost was more than willing to do the work. This was his finest hour. After
millennia
, he would finally complete his righteous mission.
A tiny ejaculate of blood spurted across the FBI man's open lips as he wailed and wailed. And the man's ragged scream was instantly drowned by the mounting winds. The rain was coming down in sheets now, immediately washing away the stringers of blood and pink, foamy drool from the wriggling man's face into the black floodwater of the burial ground.
The Holy Ghost paused for a moment, then began hissing the holiest of holy invocations: “
Si-su-meeru-ee-nu-na-tukum-pa-surru-voventuru—”
“F-ff-fuck—yyou!” the FBI man spat suddenly at the Holy Ghost; bloody, garbled words that had no meaning whatsoever. The Holy Ghost slapped the man.
Zzzzzzzzing!
An unbidden image flickered suddenly in the mind of the Holy Ghost, a mosaic of broken memories like shards of glass, a dual image: a Toltec priest on the side of a mountain, dressed in a black gown and hood, with chains of hammered bronze hanging off his shoulders, slashing his ceremonial knife across the throat of an innocent child, and overlaying this image like a double exposure, a modern man in a sweat-stained cowboy hat, a Tony the Tiger tattoo on the inside of his hairy brown forearm, hurling a young Michael Doerr across the bedroom of a remote cabin in the woods.
In the vision the boy slammed into the knob of a brass bedpost, the impact injuring his eye, knocking half his teeth out of his mouth, the tiny teeth tumbling across his floor like minuscule little dice! The boy looked down at the teeth, then up at the face of pure cruelty, the man with no eyes, the little silver granny sunglasses reflecting the child's terrified face—
In the here and now, the Holy Ghost suddenly reared back with a jerk, startled by the power and horrible symmetry of the vision.
—as another face superimposed itself over the face of Michael Doerr's father like a ghostly afterimage: the blood-streaked, insolent, dying face of the FBI profiler named Ulysses Grove. The two handsome faces so similar in appearance. The same butterscotch cream skin tone, the same long, almost feminine lashes, the same high, regal cheekbones. It was uncanny. And it was without a doubt a message from the elder gods: These were the faces of the enemy—the central figures toward whom the Holy Ghost must focus his ultimate, ceremonial powers—and the two enemies jibed so perfectly. The enemy of an ancient spirit, the enemy of an abused child—
A tormented pause here.
Closing his eyes, turning away from the subject, trembling with chaotic emotions, the Holy Ghost dropped the ritual scalpel onto the pile of instruments, which were now coated with blood as black as tar. He would extract the eyeball and the rest of the teeth later. He would prepare the subject in due course. Now it was time for the most important part of the process, and the furious sky, churning overhead, called it out to the Holy Ghost like a clarion. Vengeance!
The word, the idea, the very concept of it, called out from the black tide coming across the swamp now, from the walls of wind that were closing in, from the black beating heart of the storm itself:
Vengeance!
Yes, he was ready. He would close the circle. He would fulfill his destiny. He would use the holiest of holy knives, and he would open a vein, and he would bleed the swine to death. And he would feel the lifeblood drain out of the guilty one now because that's what the elder gods wanted.
Sacred vengeance.
That's what the angry sky and the sea and the very air itself wanted now: sacred vengeance on all the parents of the world. For all the suffering and agony visited upon the innocent children of Meridia. For the abused, and the wounded. For all the helpless lambs led to slaughter.
“Vengeance!”
The word came out of the Holy Ghost in an alien voice, garbled by emotion, thick with mucus, but loud enough to pierce the coming winds. Tears welled in the holy one's eyes and scattered in the wind. Something inside him began to contract like a flower blooming in reverse, shrinking, dilating down into a hard, black, little seed inside him. What was happening? He felt his entire being begin to shake, his body going weak, limp, palsied.
“
Vengeance
!”
He was sobbing now and didn't even realize it. He was a terrified little boy hiding under a bed as big work boots probed the floor only inches away. He was weeping uncontrollably now, a lost child in the whirlwind. “Vengeance, v-vengeance, v-vennnn—vennj—”
In his hand now was a long, honed, sacrificial ram's horn with a razor tip, which he had begun to raise with both hands, hovering it over the FBI agent.
Over the man's throat, over his jugular.
Over the cruel father's jugular.
 
 
“You put that knife down this instant or I will tan your hide, boy! You hear me!”
It took everything Grove had left, every ounce of strength that wasn't already completely sapped by the pounding agony behind his mangled left eye, just to yell loud enough to be heard.
It also took everything Grove knew about the psychopathic mind, every last shred of intuition about Doerr, every half-formed hunch he'd been developing about what had happened in the Yucatan, and the abusive childhood endured by Doerr, and even the doorway through which the alter personality had invaded Doerr's soul. It also took a significant amount of luck. Grove was betting on the fact that Doerr's original personality was deep down inside Doerr somewhere, lurking there full of pain and fear. It was a long shot, but Grove had no other options. No other plan. No other hope in those tenuous milliseconds before the blubbering killer brought the knife down.
“
I will make you sorry you were ever born, boy, if you don't put that knife down this instant!”
Grove's bawling, booming cry was hoarse and broken, barely audible over the rising wall of wind, his words impeded by the searing pain in his eye, which was still oozing blood down the side of his face. Although his eyeball was still intact—the scalpel had apparently only dislodged it slightly, severing arteries and tissue inside the top of the lid—Grove was completely blind now in the offended eye. And the pain was excruciating, a cold steel sword stabbing through the top of his skull. But he ignored it. He ignored it and gave the ruse his all.
And it seemed to be working. For the moment, at least. Doerr had frozen midstrike, the ritual knife stalled in midair, its gleaming point at its apex. In the unstable darkness, as the rising wind bull-whipped ribbons of rain across the graveyard and the bayou beyond it, and lightning slithered snakelike through the screens of rain to the south, Doerr looked like a mannequin from some macabre house of wax, a weeping executioner caught in a terrible tableau, as rain beaded on his chiseled face and arms.
Grove's own seething, tormented rage helped. It fed his barrage of patriarchal ravings:
“You hear me, boy! You hear me! You put that knife down this instant!”
Something changed then on Doerr's face, a deepening and narrowing of the eyes, a furrowing of the wrinkled, maplike forehead. His lips curled back, and rows of white teeth shone in the flickering ambient glow of oncoming lightning. The look of hate that crossed his features then was unlike anything Grove had ever seen, or ever
would
see, or ever
wanted
to see again. It mingled the anguished pain of an abused little boy with the otherworldly fury of an ancient dark god, a dark god driven by endless vengeance. It looked like a face that had turned itself inside out, a face that had rotted from
within
. It was so horrible that Grove—partially blind, seeing in the tunnel vision of a single eye—found himself transfixed, his angry gambit faltering like an engine that had abruptly died.
Doerr wailed an unearthly howl like a metal blade scraping flint and then he stabbed the pointed horn down hard toward Grove's neck—
—but Grove managed to yank himself a few inches to the right just as the weapon pierced his flesh!
A sharp needle of pain stitched across the side of his face as the wind crashed down on the trees, and there was an enormous cracking sound as the atmosphere shifted suddenly, and a gust slammed into Doerr, a sheet of rain as deadly as a spray of bullets, making the back of Doerr's long black coat flap and twist so noisily it sounded like a drumroll.
Another gust hit them full-bore, throwing Doerr across the train tracks. He sprawled to the ground, still gripping the weapon.
The feeling was coming back into Grove's arms now in prickling stages, and he flailed and strained against the bonds, the left side of his face throbbing with cold wet pain, his wrists on fire. The eye wall loomed. The noise drowned out all other sound. The trees jittered crazily, great tumbleweeds of Spanish moss spinning through the air.
Doerr was screaming something, but none of it reached Grove's battered eardrums. All Grove heard now was the eye wall, its dragon roar like a billion angry voices. The rain had become a spinning dynamo around the boneyard, blurring the night, pounding the land, engulfing them in layers of misery. Grove cried out with equal parts rage and agony when he saw Doerr climbing back to his feet and coming for him with the razor-tipped horn gripped in white knuckles.
This was the end. Grove sensed it. So did Doerr. The pointed horn would finish Grove now, and then the storm would wipe Doerr off the face of the earth, and nobody would be left to tell the tale.
Doerr lunged.
Something popped in the air.
It happened right before the knife had a chance to reach Grove, and Doerr jerked backward suddenly, startled, like a man who had just stumbled into a cobweb. He blinked and blinked and coughed once and looked around the sheets of churning gray for the source of the noise.
Grove lay there for a moment, nearly blind, skull throbbing, blood salty in his mouth, body as tense as a spring, his breath stuck in his throat. What the hell had just happened? Over the clamor of the hurricane, it had sounded like a small balloon had popped, but there was something else that had accompanied it, almost in unison with the popping noise:
A spark had jumped off the rail!
Everything seemed to seize up then like clockwork jamming as both men gazed off the south, an almost comical double take, both of them glancing up at the crumbling brick rampart that ran along the lower edge of the cemetery beyond the railroad tracks, veiled in billowing blankets of rain.
The figure was barely visible down there.
She looked like a ghost.
A fading ghost.
 
 
It was a miracle she was still standing, considering her injuries and the proximity of the inner eye wall a hundred yards behind her. It was also a miracle that she had placed her first shot so close to the killer—considering the fact that she had never fired a gun in her life.
The little .38-caliber ninety-grain load had skipped off the iron only inches from Doerr's right leg.
Now only one round remained, and she stood there wavering in the fierce slashes of lightning and killer rain on top of those ancient paving stones, one hand clutching the slippery, scabrous cast-iron gatepost, the other hand shakily aiming the tiny two-shot derringer pistol at the two men on the ground by the railroad tracks.
She could not see very well—her swollen right eye had already closed up, the salt spray stinging her left—and her body had already begun to shut down from the exhaustion and hypothermia and wounds. Each injury told the story of her flight.
The deep gash running down the length of her left thigh had resulted from the leap out the back of the bungalow as Kaminsky valiantly held the killer at bay. The broken ribs, the sprained wrist, and the bruises over 90 percent of her body had occurred during her death-defying circumnavigation of New Orleans on floating wreckage. As Fiona's eye wall had rampaged its way north across the Central Business District, and then slammed into the neighboring bayou, Maura had followed a hunch: She kept up with Doerr by remaining
inside
the eye.

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