The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1) (11 page)

They sat in the cemetery behind an old church whose stones had turned black from the dirt and filth of the years it had weathered, much like Guillotine’s soul.  The boy had become confused when Guillotine stopped him from making sexual advances, assuring him that all he really wanted was simply company.  He told him that he didn’t often get to enjoy conversation with people due to his disfigurement.  The boy relaxed, seemed much more at ease now he did not have to perform physically and they had talked until the early hours, sharing stories of their childhoods over that delicious bottle of stolen wine. 

Guillotine had told him things he had never told anyone, finding himself helplessly gushing out a tearful confession about his Aunts, Madeleine and Marie, how they drove him to do such terrible things.  How, when they brought him home to the farmhouse from his mother’s funeral, they had told him he was their ward now.  That they had to see to his upbringing now “that whore of a mother” was gone and left this dark chaos in her wake, he was their problem.  Bastard child of an unwed woman and a German man.  A German.  Such a betrayal, after what they did to Paris in the war.   He was a reminder of what a disgrace she was to the family.  He was the result of a disgusting union between a French whore and a German monster, nothing more than an abomination.  An animal.  Deciding so, they sent him out of the farmhouse and walked him to the barn, where he was to live with the other animals. He could eat what they threw in the trough for the pigs, living off what they left behind. 

He had cried hot tears as he told the boy about the priest at the church in the village near the farmhouse.  Father Varrick.  How his Aunts had taken him there and left him to have “the devil cast out of his body”.  Father Varrick had spoken in low, soothing tones as he “purified” him on the altar in the empty church with the doors locked and nobody to hear him cry, just like in the barn.  He had focused on the huge painting on the wall behind the altar as the Priest went about his holy instruction, clearing the Devil from him through pain.  That painting had him transfixed.  It was so beautiful, so beguiling, so real.  It came alive, rippling before his eyes and welcomed him inside to play. It depicted heaven, clouds and soft bright lights, smiles and happiness. Angels and light and love and beauty in the top half, then a mirror image of hell, demons torturing the suffering lost souls and the damned, who, looking up, desperately wanted to be in the light.  He could sympathize with them, knew exactly how they felt.  He wanted to be with the angels, up there where it was safe and bright and he wondered how the Angels would fare in the darkness of the pits.  Could that light survive down there?  Could it bring order to chaos, peace to suffering.  He wanted to believe so.  They brought him to the Priest for “purification” every week.  The Devil, according Father Varrick, had a strong hold on the boy.

He had used the cheese wire on the boy as he slipped in to a wine fuelled sleep, gently easing it around his neck from behind and squeezing tight as tears bled out of his eyes and fell on the boy’s forehead.  He remembered living in the dirt in the barn and squeezed harder, feeling the boy’s windpipe pop like biting in to an apple.  He felt his muscles tighten to their very limit and felt all the pain of the first time he stood before the cracked mirror on the wall by the stables and took his dead father’s straight razor and began to cut his face, reveling in the pain of true failure, destroying himself his way before they could do it their way. Guillotine dropped the boy in front of a gravestone that nobody could read anymore.  He searched his pockets and found the gun, wrapped in the oil cloth.  The boy couldn’t have been more than twenty one and was already selling himself for sexual favors and debasing himself.  It was time he was sweetly eased from the world before more pain and humiliation could find him.  He cried for the boy, wishing there was something more he could have done, but knew this was the best thing for him and he cursed the world for the way it greedily ate up the innocent with an insatiable hunger.  He had given the boy peace.  The gun made for a souvenir of the destruction of the innocent, proof that there were, sadly, others like him in the world but that there was a blissful end to all the pain.  He just had to find his.

He wondered what souvenir he would take from Lara McBride.

Chapter Eighteen

Lara sat on the front row of the main room in the funeral home.  Her parents lay still and frozen in the open caskets on display before her.  Family and friends were cycling through the room, paying their respects, offering condolences, everyone saying how sorry they were.  Lara was sorry, too, but after the fifteenth time of hearing the same epithets, sincere as they might be, she had become numb to it.  She wondered why people said these things.  She wondered where all this sincerity had been before her parents had been murdered and why it took such a harrowing obscenity to the world to bring these people together.  Half the family had never bothered with her or little Janelle, sat beside her now, swinging her legs, holding a little crocodile plush toy with a yellow t-sirt that said “smile”.  She called the crocodile “Fred” and never slept without him these days.  Funny kid, so sweet and with such a big heart, she seemed to have amazing sympathy for the things in the world that others dismissed.  She seemed to think about how their feelings would be hurt, how lonely they must be and that they needed somebody to love them and she would be that person.  She really was an angel. 

Lara had driven back from college an hour after she had received the phone call that changed her life.  She was nineteen, a big age difference between her and Janelle. She didn’t have much in the dorm room and it all went in the trunk of the beat up Honda she had paid for with the money she’d earned spending all summer working at the morgue.  She had seen dead people many times.  Never expected to see her parents that way so soon.  Once she got back and had come to the hospital for Janelle to sign the identification forms that the deceased were, indeed, her parents, reality had hit her.  She was responsible for Janelle now.  She couldn’t hand her over to anyone else in the family.  They didn’t know her.  Moreover, she didn’t know them. Or trust them.  That meant she would have to move back permanently.  She could transfer her degree, go to college in Los Angeles, make it work somehow.  She wasn’t just Janelle’s sister anymore.  She was her guardian.

She looked at Janelle and brushed her hair out of her face as she played with Fred.  Janelle looked at her.  Lara could tell she was sad, but in that child’s way, she was dealing with the present, with what was happening right now and she needed someone to tell her what would happen next.

“Will they come back, Lara?” Janelle asked, hopeful.

“No, sweetie,” Lara said, putting her arm around the little girl’s shoulder and kissing her on the forehead.  “It’s just you and me now.  I’ll be here for you. I’ll keep you safe.  I’ll never let anything happen to you.”

“Promise?”

“On my life.”

Janelle moved in closer and hugged Lara.  Fred was in her hand, on Lara’s knee, watching placidly with his big crocodile smile.  Lara suddenly felt cold and looked around the room.  It was empty.  Everyone had gone, left them alone, locked in here with the dead.  She knew this wasn’t right.  She stood up and approached the caskets.  Janelle was on her feet, clutching Fred close to her chest, her big eyes welling with fear, standing in the aisle.

“Where did they go?” Janelle asked.

“Heaven, I think,”  Lara said.

She looked at her father’s face.  Peaceful, serene, not really him, but an artist’s rendition, put together by someone who never knew him.  He used to smell of cologne and soap.  Now he smelled of bleach.  She saw the black ribbons flutter up from beneath the casket and she took a step back in shock.  They looked like tentacles snaking out from an unseen entity that had torn its way in to her world.  They wrapped themselves around the casket, then reached out greedily for their mother’s.  Lara saw the ribbons shoot up from the back of the room, rapidly covering the wall and the cross hanging from it.  The caskets were gone, the black ribbons so fine and so many that it looked like this part of the room had been removed from existence, replaced by the vast eternal darkness of oblivion.  There was no emotion or feeling here.  Everything was simply fact- the darkness existed and it could infect anything else in Lara’s vision just by touching it.  She heard Janelle scream.

She turned and saw her sister running for the door at the other end of the aisle.  The ribbons shot out from behind Lara, passing over her, reaching desperately towards Janelle.

“No!” she cried and began to run after her.

Janelle pulled the door open and stopped in shock.  A tall, thin figure, little more than a silhouette, stood in the doorway.  The face was a blur except for the scars on its face.  The scars stood out, as clear as the rest of him was out of focus.  He wrapped his arms around Janelle, holding her close to him.  She struggled, trying to get away from him, but she couldn’t.  Fred fell on the carpet.  Lara was running as hard as she could towards him.  The black ribbons reached him first, wrapping around him, lifting him up and bringing him suddenly with terrifying speed right up to Lara.  She slammed in to him and fell on her back.  He loomed above her, a Silhouette Man with a blurred face, clutching her sister and floating just inches above her.

“You look like an angel, Lara.  Weep for me,” he said.

Helpless, she was trapped in a nightmare that had fused her memories with her dreams and her subconscious would hold her prisoner until she could find the trigger that would wake her up.

Chapter Nineteen

Guillotine stood across the street from the hospital and watched the Police cars arriving one by one.  He thought he might be able to slip inside, get his hands on a doctor’s coat and gain access to the room where she was being held.  But, with all the Police activity, there would be too many eyes, too many guns, too great a possibility his mission would fail.  He had to be patient, think through all the angles and then make his move.  There would be an opening, a chance oversight that would allow him to close in on his target.  He had to stay sharp and aware and be ready to move once he saw his chance.  He would not have much time.

At the front entrance of the hospital, he saw a tall man with an immaculate beard and a long flowing overcoat giving explicit orders to the uniformed cops.  This must be the head Policeman, he thought.  An Inspector, by the looks of him.  The same man he had seen down by the river giving orders to the paramedics and Police.  He was instructing the officers here to guard the American woman’s room, never to leave the front door unattended.  Every visitor had to be checked, their ID’s copied no matter who they were or which patient they claimed to be visiting.  The Inspector clearly meant business and that would make Guillotine’s job harder.  But he loved a challenge and he savored the opportunity to figure out how to succeed against what appeared to be overwhelming odds.  He would not fail again.

The Inspector got in his Renault and drove away, leaving one cop at the front door, another three going inside. The game had already begun and he felt he had arrived late.  Lara had been good and, given time, would probably have found him through sheer dedication and persistence.  He knew all about persistence and what it took to focus on achieving one single goal.  He broke life down in to a series of goals to accomplish, all smaller parts of a bigger machine. Playing cat and mouse with the American cop had given him a rush, and, selfishly, he thought he must be close to realizing his dream and unleashing his greatest work on the world, for why else would fate send someone like her to pursue him and try to stop him now when he was so close?  It was a test.  Success was his for the taking.

He started crossing the street and noticed the small side entrance on the west wing of the building the cops had overlooked.  There were simply too many access points to gain entry in to the hospital for three officers to keep an eye on them all.  He had to move now while they were still mobilizing. Then he stopped as he saw two news vans pull up outside the hospital.  A cameraman and a beautiful woman with far too much make up who could only be a reporter hopped out of the first van and walked with purpose to the entrance.  The officer stationed there rolled his eyes and walked out to stop them. Guillotine was heading for the side entrance when he saw one of the other cops through the glass window of the door, a little further inside, by the elevators and stairwell.  Even if he got in now, he would get no further.  He cursed his timing and wished he had got here sooner, forgoing the trip to the storage garage, which, it seemed, had cost him valuable time.  He weighed up all the angles, knew he could not stay out here much longer before he was seen.  To turn back now, though, meant failure.  A few seconds later, he saw more Police cars racing to the scene and knew he was completely outnumbered.  He had missed the window of opportunity and would have to settle for waiting for another day.  In the meantime, all he could do was hope the wound he had inflicted would take its course on his beautiful pursuer and finish her sometime later in the night.

He turned and walked away.  Leaving what happened to Fate made this game an art and he lived for that. Not a victory, not a defeat, the game was still playing out. And so, Guillotine went home. To work.