Spellbent (35 page)

“You really thought I’d never find out the baby wasn’t mine, Siobhan?” Lake demanded.

He muttered a charm under his breath, and the unconscious man was flung across the room to land at the woman’s feet. The man groaned, rolled over; his face was battered and swollen, but still bore a noticeable resemblance to Cooper’s.

“Speak up, woman!” Lake barked. “You’d rather be with Corvus here? You’d rather abandon your husband and firstborn son and live with this philandering fuck?”

“No,” the woman wept. “It—it just happened.”

“Oh. I see. You just,
oopsie,
slipped in the kitchen and happened to land on his dick, is that it?”

“It was only one night,” she pleaded. “My mother just died, and you were in Europe.” Her voice cracked with desperation and fear. “I’d never abandon you, or Benny. I love you.”

His handsome face darkened with madness that frightened me even through glass. It was as if a cold shadow of evil was seeping in through the walls, eclipsing the entire room.

“Love
us? That’s a laugh. You’ve shamed me, shamed your firstborn son. I’m going to have to send Benny away to boarding school, just to keep him away from your bad influence. You’re nothing but a white-trash whore.”

 “Please don’t hurt us,” she begged.

“Hurt
you?
My lovey-dovey wife? And your ittlewittle bastard? Oh, not I. I’d never hurt
you.
I’d only ever want to give the love of my life what she most desires. And if actions speak louder than words—and believe me, they most certainly do—what you want most in this world is to fuck this piece of dogshit as often as possible and spawn his brats. And you’re gonna get your wish, dear wife, you can count on that.”

The window went dark; I moved to the next looping memory-scene. Lake was standing in the basement, looking angrier and crazier than before, a whiskey bottle clenched in one hand and a wand in the other. Corvus labored with a shovel in a dirt pit in the floor.

“Keep going, asshole,” Lake said as Corvus paused to rest. “I didn’t tell you to stop.”

“Please, man,” Corvus begged. “I’m sorry I did your woman. I was drunk. It was only once. I didn’t mean for her to get pregnant.”

“You can be sorry all you want; you’re still gonna dig that hole as deep as I tell you.”

Corvus held up his blistered, bleeding hands. “For God’s sake, at least let me have some gloves!”

“You’ll get gloves when I hear that handle grinding on bone. Not before.”

I moved to the next window. Here the pit was finished, about six feet in diameter, twelve feet deep, and lined with fieldstones. I recognized it as the same pit I’d used to enter the hell. Corvus and Siobhan stood naked in the pit, staring up at Lake, who stood at the edge with a dark-haired baby in his arms. The baby looked healthy and well cared for, and didn’t seem aware of the peril his parents were in.

“I wanna see you two fuck.
Now,”
Lake ordered, his voice low and even.

“This is crazy.” Corvus was much thinner than he’d been before, his hipbones sticking out sharply, his arms and back scarred with fresh cuts.

“Now,
studmuffin. Your boy Cooper here needs a little brother to play with. Don’t oo, oo little bastard oo,” Lake cooed to the baby.

“Honey,
please.”
Siobhan looked as if she’d been crying so much she’d run out of tears. “I’m sorry my friends came looking for me; I sent them away, just like you asked. They don’t suspect anything, and they won’t come here again.”

Lake seemed to not even hear her. “I better see some baby-making down there real- soon, or lil’ Cooper’s going straight out the attic window onto the driveway. Think he’ll live? Think your boy can learn to fly all on his own?” Lake began to bounce the baby in his arms, singing “The window, the window, the third-story window! High-low, low-high, throw him Out the window!”

Shuddering, I moved on. At the next window, a toddler in a diaper was playing with wooden blocks on the concrete floor in another part of the basement. A large Raggedy Andy doll lay near him. The floor had been chalked with complex signs and sigils; I recognized some of them from Cooper’s tattoos.

Nearby, Lake knelt beside Cooper, who looked to be about three years old. The man handed Cooper a sharp stiletto blade.

“Now, be careful, don’t cut yourself. Do you remember those words I taught you?” Lake asked.

“Uh-huh.” Cooper turned the knife over in his hands, fascinated.

 “And what are you going to do while you say those words?”

“Cut the doll’s neck and belly,” Cooper replied obediently. “And not myself.”

“Very good!” Lake exclaimed, as if all this was a delightful game. “You’re such a good boy, and your big brother Benny will be so pleased that you’re practicing to help him be such a big man someday.”

“How I make him big man?”

“Blue has power; he was born with it, like you. But he doesn’t deserve it, so after practice today I’m going to put him down for a nice long nap so he doesn’t get any bigger than he is now. And someday, when
you’re
bigger—but not
too
big—and when Benny’s old enough to be a man, we’ll do all this for real. And the words you say will give you Blue’s power when you cut his neck. And then your job is to give the power to Benny. He can’t know what we’re up to—it has to be a surprise present. And then all that power you’ve saved up will help make him the biggest man in the whole wide world, and he won’t have had to hurt his soul to do it.”

“Will he be giant big?”

“Giant big, for sure!” Lake stood up and went over to a worktable on which a polished music box sat. He lifted the lid, and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” began to chime through the basement.

“Benny fav’rite song!” Cooper hopped up and down, excited.

“Yes it is! Now, go get Raggedy Andy and show me what a good little brother you are. .

I stepped away from the window. Jesus H. Christ. Lake had hatched a plan to turn Cooper into some kind of living magic battery, training him to perform black magic death rituals to absorb his younger brothers’ magical powers. What kind of twisted freak would think up something like that?

I went to the next window.

Siobhan was weeping in the corner of one of the upstairs bedrooms, wailing “Oh baby Blue. . .“

Lake came in with little Blue, now locked in an enchanted sleep, as still and beautiful as a china doll. “Stop your crying, woman, he’s not hurt, he’s just asleep. I’d never let anything bad happen to the little guy until it’s time to kill him!”

I flinched and moved along.

Corvus was in the bottom of the pit, staring up at Lake, his eyes red from weeping.

“You crazy fuck,” Corvus sobbed.

“Can’t have you trying to run away again.” Lake impassively threw down a hacksaw and two lengths of rubber hose. “I want those legs off above the knee. And trust me, you don’t want me to come down there and do it myself.”

I fled the window and went to the next.

Lake led his nearly catatonic wife into a bathroom and pulled off her filthy dress. Her emaciated body was covered in sores.

“Hate to have to do things this way,” he told her cheerfully, “but I don’t have much choice now that Corvus up and died on us, do I? There’s got to be a seventh son, or the spell won’t work. So I’ve got to do my husbandly duty for a change.”

I moved on again.

Cooper was six or seven years old, sobbing into his pillow. He lay on a single bed inside an eight-by eight-foot chain-link dog pen in the corner of the basement. His cinder-block walls were bare.

“It’s not right; I don’t want to hurt them,” the boy wept.

“You’ll do as I tell you, or I’ll have to kill your mother,” Lake replied, standing somewhere in the shadows beyond the boy’s locked pen door. “And you don’t want that, do you?”

“N-no.”

“It’s bad enough I had to put you in here to keep you from running
off.”
Lake stepped into the light, shaking his head. “Like father, like son, I guess.”

“I see him at night. My father. He’s mad about what you want me to do to my brothers.”

“Well, of course he is, dumb-ass!”

“Can’t we bury him proper? He don’t like the freezer.”

“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like.” Lake was finally sounding angry, and I could feel Cooper’s fear intensify. “Shut up and do as you’re told. All this will be over soon.”

This scene, unlike the others, did not go black; it simply looped, an unending scene of misery for the boy. After a few minutes of watching, feeling profoundly sad for the child and more and more furious he’d been put to such a monstrous task, I moved on to the final window.

Cooper, just a bit older, was on the sacrifice floor. He was kneeling, staring down at the body of a baby who looked to be about nine months old. A sword- and-shield pendant—the one the Warlock had given me—was almost unrecognizable under the baby’s blood. The old music box tinkled the hateful Christmas carol. Lake stood nearby, arms crossed over his chest, looking satisfied. Siobhan lay dead at his feet; a short distance away four infant brothers lay still and beautiful in their enchanted sleep.

Cooper’s eyes filled with tears, his jaw working wordlessly. Something was building inside him, something dark and far too strong for such a little body to hold.

“Good work,” said Lake, who apparently couldn’t sense the growing danger I felt. “One down, four to go. Benny will be home tomorrow, and you’ll never have to do this again. When he gets here, you attack me like I told you, and Benny will save me. He’ll have to kill you to do it, but by now you’re okay with that, aren’t you, boy? The dead don’t have bad dreams.

“And my son will be a big, brave hero doing good by saving his loving daddy from his crazy half brother, so he’ll inherit all the power you’ve saved for him without any of the ghosts. He’ll get the best birthday present a father could ever give a son.”

Cooper dropped the knife, threw his head back, and howled. Lake clamped his hands over his ears and fell to his knees. A hot rose bloomed in Cooper’s chest, exploded outward with a storm force that blew the boards off the floor above them. The blast threw Lake into the cinder-block wall; he fell in a broken heap onto the concrete.

When the dust cleared, Cooper touched his little brother’s slashed neck, and the wound sealed. The baby’s eyes fluttered open. Looking stunned, Cooper carefully lifted him to his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Cooper whispered to him, awkwardly patting his back. “I didn’t mean it, I never wanted to hurt you, I’ll take good care of you always like Momma told me to.. .“

The boy carried the baby up the smoking stairs toward the bright light of the open front door.

A living shadow seeped out of the walls, touched the bodies of Lake and Siobhan and the four sleeping children, then drew them all into its darkness.

The windows went black, all but the loop of young Cooper weeping in his bedroom. I went back to that window and blinked through several gemviews.

In one, Cooper was an adult curled on the tiny bed, holding his head in his hands and shivering.

I was elated. Cooper was really in there, and it looked like he was still alive. I banged on the glass with the palm of my hand.

“Cooper! It’s me, Jessie. . . get up! I’m here for you!”

He didn’t seem to hear me, or if he did, he was too far gone to respond.

I beat the window with the pommel of my sword, hoping I could shatter the glass. It wouldn’t even crack. “Cooper, snap out of it! We’ve got to get out of here!”

The hallway shuddered like a living thing. The bare bulbs flicked out for a moment, and when they came back on the ceiling was impossibly high, the candles distant stars, and a huge oak door that looked like the entrance to a giant’s castle had sprung up where the stairway had been.

The door swung open, and King Lake stepped inside, monstrous and dark in leather armor and sable robes. He was twice my height, at least, as big to me as he’d surely seemed to toddler Blue. He carried an executioner’s ax, the rust-mottled head almost as big as my shield.

“My hospitality not good enough for you?” Lake rumbled. “You’ve got some nerve snooping around where you don’t belong. Maybe your daddy couldn’t teach you proper manners, but I sure can.”

Lake crossed the hall impossibly quickly for something of his size, and I barely had time to raise my shield as his ax came down. The clang of steel on bronze made my ears ring. The shield held, but the blow knocked me sideways into the wood-paneled wall.

I leaped to my feet and stabbed Lake hard as I could through his leather trousers into his thigh, right where his femoral artery ought to be. But it was like sticking my sword in a sawdust-filled dummy. No blood, no pain, no reaction.

My sword stuck fast in his leg, he pivoted sideways, jerking the weapon out of my hand. Another swing, the ax coming down at the back of my neck fast and hard. I ducked. His blow caught the rivets on the rear edge of my helmet and knocked it clattering across the stone floor.

Immediately, the air felt cold and suffocating in my throat. I scrambled forward to retrieve my helmet, realizing there was almost no place for me to go, no way to escape. It was a mistake to fight Lake, but he’d come at me so
fast.
If I could get back to his polite version, would he stop his attack? Or was the refuge of that vision lost to me now that I’d fought back?