The Bleeding Season (44 page)

I slipped through the doorway.  The room was the same one the woman had lured me to that night.  There was garbage strewn from one corner to the next, and as I moved the light about the room, I saw the familiar symbols painted in red paint or blood smeared across the walls.  What was once the door to the office had been suspended between two small stacks of cinderblocks to form the same makeshift altar I had seen that night.

The same as before, something lay beneath it in a heap on the floor, dark and unmoving, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

“What the fuck’s that shit all over the walls?” Rick asked from behind me.

“Hexes or spells—God knows.”  I sighed.  “I have no idea.”

“Is it blood?”

“I think so.”

“Jesus.”

“I think it’s some sort of announcement, or a marking, something like that.”

“Maybe it’s a warning.”

A chill of fear reminded me I hadn’t thought of that.  I nodded, swung the light over to the door across the cinderblocks.  “That’s supposed to be an altar, I think.”

“What’s that on the floor?”

I swallowed so hard I nearly gagged.  “Not sure.”

“I got a bad feeling about all this, man.”

“Yeah, no fucking shit, do you really?”  I shot him an annoyed look, crouched a bit and crept deeper into the room, toward the altar.  When I was within a few feet of it, I realized that whatever was beneath it had been covered with an old wool blanket.  I waved Rick over and handed him the flashlight.  “Shine it here,” I said, pointing.

He did, and I noticed it trembling slightly, along with my hand, as I reached for the blanket and yanked it free.

“Oh, Christ.”  I dropped the blanket and backed away.  “No.”

Rick kept staring, the flashlight pointed at it.  “It doesn’t look real.”

I ran a hand through my sweaty hair.  “It’s
destroyed
.”

He shook his head, his lips moving rapidly but soundlessly.

“That night in the factory,” I said, “the woman lured me to this room and showed me her little boy.  He was dead.  They were—they were both dead.”  Memories of that night flooded my mind, but I no longer needed them, they had become truth right before my eyes.  “Bernard’s victims were all single mothers with sons.  The killings were rituals, and Claudia told me the final victims, the final ritual sacrifices before he committed suicide would include not only the mother, but also the son.”

“Why would he do that to a…a little kid?” Rick mumbled.  “Why would he do that?”

“Goddamn bloodbath,” I said.  “He slaughtered him and painted the walls with his blood.  He butchered a helpless little boy.”  I forced myself to look back at the small body crumpled beneath the altar, tossed there like the rest of the garbage littering the floor.  That which Bernard hadn’t savaged, the rats had.  What remained was mutilated and battered to the point that when I had first seen it I wasn’t entirely certain of what it was.  I could only imagine the terror the child had suffered, the abject terror.  Anger joined the fear coursing through my veins.  “You motherfucker!”  I screamed at the darkness, my voice echoing eerily in the empty space.  “Mother
fucker
!”

Rick grabbed my shoulder, hard.  “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

I shook free of him, reached down and threw the blanket back over the body.  “We’re not going anywhere until this is finished.”  I faced him.  “This ends here, tonight.”

Just then, Rick noticed something in the darkness.  His eyes slowly lifted, and I could tell from the look on his face that there was something above us.  “Jesus—Jesus Christ,” he babbled.  “Sweet Jesus Christ in Heaven.”

Following his stare, and then the flashlight beam to the low ceiling overhead, I saw the woman—the boy’s mother—floating in midair.

CHAPTER 34

I was either in shock or frightened to the point where I was incapable of running.  Instead, I stood gawking, struggling to prevent my mind from splintering, and a moment later realized the woman was not floating after all.

She had been crucified to the ceiling.

I heard Rick vomit as I moved closer and gazed up at the carnage.  The woman had been gutted, and her emaciated torso lay open and empty.  Nails roughly the size of railway spikes had been driven through her hands and feet.  Her eyelids had been sliced away, and her eyes were sunken and covered in gray mucus, forever forced to look down upon her maimed child.  Her face was drawn and sallow, just as I remembered it.

You here about the plumbing?
   

“No,” I whispered, “and neither was he.”

In those few seconds it seemed all sanity deserted us.  We were in Hell, and I was so terrified, so overcome with fear, I could barely prevent myself from completely breaking down.  Emotion was raw now, and all the rules of life and death had changed.  Lies and truth, fantasy and reality, good and evil—they had all become one.

“He’s here.”  I took the flashlight back.  “I can feel him.”

Rick wiped his mouth clean and gave a resolute nod.

I pushed past him and left the room.  There were two small offices and a large metal staircase at the end of the hallway.  We inspected the offices quickly.  They were filled with broken furniture and garbage but nothing else, so I shone the light toward the staircase.  Most of the steps were cluttered with debris.  Two large windows at the head of the stairs were smeared with filth, but as more fireworks exploded, the colorful lights bled through the old panes and offered a glimpse of the top of the stairs.

In the flash of light, something on the landing moved.

“Fuck!”  I backed away and nearly tripped.  I swept the flashlight around but the beam wasn’t strong enough, and darkness again swallowed the top of the stairs.

“What?  What is it?”

“There’s something up there,” I whispered.  “I just saw it move.”

“More rats?”

I shook my head in the negative.  “Too big.”

“There must still be homeless living in here then,” he said hopefully.

Rather than answering, I held my hand up for him to be quiet.  We stood still a moment and waited for lapses between the fireworks to listen more carefully, but each time, all we heard was wind and ocean.

I climbed the first two stairs, distributing my weight carefully to make certain they could still safely accommodate us.  Rick followed close behind.  Once we’d covered three stairs, the flashlight was finally able to reveal the landing.  I leaned against the railing and aimed the light, but from our vantage point all I could see beyond it was more darkness.  We had no way of knowing if the second floor was safe to walk on, but
something
 was up there, and one way or another, I was going after it.

We crept onto the landing and saw that the second floor was entirely gutted, an enormous open space with high ceilings.  Again, the floor was cluttered and the same horrible smells pervaded the area, but the darkness here seemed different.

It was nearly alive.

I slowly swept the pool of light across the vast room.

“Who’s there?” Rick yelled suddenly.  “Come out, we just want to talk to you.”

I glared at him but he didn’t notice, his eyes staring straight ahead.  There was no answer, no sounds of movement.

“You’re sure you saw something?” he whispered.

As I slid the light along the wall closest to us, it illuminated a nearby open doorway.  Shadows darted away, and this time I knew Rick had seen them too.  “Positive.”

My heart and mind were racing so fast I wasn’t sure how much more I could endure.  I wrestled with a tremor of fear, fought it off and stepped closer to the doorway.  The light reflected off something within the room.  Tiles.  A wall covered in old filthy tiles.

“It’s a bathroom,” Rick said.

The sign buried in the cellar wall of Bernard’s house had been taken from a bathroom, a bathroom in this mill.

With my free hand, I reached behind me, pulled my 9mm free of its holster and glanced nervously at Rick.  He dropped a hand to the grip of his knife but left it in the scabbard.  His face and neck were slick with sweat.

Another round of fireworks burst across the sky, and on this floor, with all the windows and open space, it lighted the area far more intensely than it had below.  I pictured countless people gathered on the public beach several miles down the coast, watching the displays and enjoying their Fourth of July.  I pictured Donald pacing near his telephone.  I pictured Toni dressed in dark clothes, standing at my gravesite with another man and grinning at me from behind black lace.  I pictured Claudia in her dark and dirty cottage, straddled atop me, rocking slowly, hands pressed flat against my chest, pushing me deeper into the worn, stained mattress, her breasts full, wet and dripping sweat as I tell her, “I’m closing in on him.” And her shaking her head and whispering,  “He’s closing in on you.”  I pictured the families and loved ones of the victims crying and mourning, walking alongside caskets leaking blood.  I pictured Bernard painting walls with the same blood, with body fluids and excrement, and from somewhere deep inside, heard the shrieks of the dead mingled with his laughter.

The fireworks faded to black, returned us to darkness.

We followed the shadows into the bathroom.  The stench wafting from within was gut-wrenching, and as the flashlight crawled along ahead of us, we saw that the tiled walls were awash in a caked crimson so dark it was nearly black.  I moved the beam around the room.  The entire area was covered in blood.  Even the floors were smeared with it.  With the smell, in limited light and enclosed space, I imagined it was similar to being trapped within the bloody carcass of some enormous, brutally slain animal.

“Over there,” Rick said, his voice flat, void.

I swung the light in the direction he indicated.

A large industrial size sink ran nearly the full length of the back wall, above which had once been a mirror, though only shards and small sections of glass panels remained intact, fracturing our dark reflections back at us as if through some demented prism.

There was a line of urinals to our right, but only a few were still attached to the wall, the rest had fallen or been torn free and lay in pieces on the floor.  On the opposite wall were the devastated remnants of stalls and toilets.  Blood spatters were everywhere, like a painter had taken a very wide and wet brush and flicked it repeatedly about the room for hours, only to finish by taking up the paint bucket and dousing the area with whatever remained.

We inched closer to the sink.  It had overflowed long before with what could only be a sickening combination of various body fluids and blood.  Whatever the concoction had once been, it was now reduced to a dark gelatinous slop.

And within this demonic fluid lay a bevy of body parts protruding from the mess like dinosaurs stuck in tar pits.  I moved the light along the sink, past a human head, to a portion where what appeared to be a torso floated on its side.  Maggots writhed along the surface.  Rick turned away and vomited again, and though my body wanted to join him, I was hit with violent dry heaves instead.

“Fucking slaughterhouse,” Rick gasped.

I holstered the 9mm, bent over, put my hands on my knees and took several deep breaths.  The pool of light fell between us.  On the floor, facing the sink, an upside down cross was painted in blood.  Other strange symbols had been drawn around it, along with a word that had been smudged and neither of us could make out.

“I can’t even tell how many are in there,” I managed a moment later.

Rick spat on the floor.  “Have you ever—
ever
—felt anything like this before?”

I knew exactly what he meant.  There was a pervasive sense of evil here, a tangible essence of it hanging in the air like dense fog, and it was so strong that I could feel it being absorbed into my pores, mixing with the moisture in my eyes, inhaled up and into my nose and clinging to the roof of my mouth.  “No.”

“We’re leaving right-fucking-now.”  He staggered away and headed for the door.

I followed, trying my best to keep the light aimed in front of him, but he was at a full run before I reached the main room, and once there, it took me a few seconds to locate him.  Firing the flashlight in various directions and calling his name, I finally found him running through the room, stumbling through piles of garbage and debris as he went, the knife free of the scabbard and clutched in his hand, blade down.

A glow of various colors lit the sky and a greater portion of the room, which gave me my bearings.  Instead of making for the staircase, Rick had become disoriented and was running the wrong way, deeper into the darkness.  “Rick, no!  Wrong way!  Wrong way!”

He looked back over his shoulder, nearly fell, quickly regained his balance and spun around in an attempt to change directions.  But as he did so a loud cracking sound echoed across the room, and with a frantic and helpless shout, he fell straight down and out of sight.

The floor had given way and swallowed him whole.

I ran toward the spot where I’d last seen him, doing my best to keep the light level and all the while fearful the floor might also give out on me at any moment.  I arrived at the hole quickly, crouched next to it carefully and shined the light through.  A large section of flooring had collapsed and now lay in a heap on the floor below, along with Rick, who was sprawled out and covered in filth, but conscious.

“Are you all right?” I called down.  He didn’t answer, but moved groggily and shielded his eyes from the light.  His arms and legs were moving, albeit slowly and with some effort, but it didn’t look like he had sustained any serious injuries.  “Stay there,” I told him.  “I’m coming down.”

I noticed his knife near the edge of the hole.  He had apparently dropped it when he fell.  I scooped it up with my free hand and aimed the light back in the direction of the staircase.  But before I had taken a step I heard a strange squishing sound, and from behind me came a deep gurgling voice.

“
Welcome to my Eden
.”

CHAPTER 35

A stream of fireworks shot through the sky, firing sparks into the air and releasing shrill wails as they fell to the ground in slow spirals.  A rapid-fire series of red and blue bursts followed.  The finale had begun.