Once a corpulent madam, a confidence trickster, a psychopath weaned on Scientology, even a woman once, but one that had crowned herself an eternal queen of dust and damnation and the destruction of innocence. A terrible spirit that had journeyed into a child and become this disease-ravaged man, this shell rendered skeletal and effeminate by a parasite’s excesses.
After all he had seen, Kyle wanted it dead. Before it could get, by some invisible and dreadful byway,
into that.
The small body concealed by white silk sheets in the neighbouring bed, where the small dark head of a child was visible upon deep pillows.
The child moved under the bedlinen, but was not awake.
It moved fitfully, kicked out under the covers, muttered.
Appeared engaged in some kind of struggle. Perhaps a fight against an unnatural visitor. One who wished to rise again.
Kyle tried to tear through the plastic tent. It was sealed.
He stood back, to the side of the plastic cube, so that he could see the narrow flanks of its hovering occupant, and took aim. And fired and fired and fired and fired at the levi -
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tating ruin of Chet Regal. And he kept firing until he saw the thin figure jerk and jerk and jerk again. Then fall with a clatter more than a thump, upon the bed, into which it bled black.
Through the bullet-torn plastic, Kyle kicked and clawed and rent and tore until he was inside and at the foot of the bed, where the bullet-ruined thing shuddered and wheezed.
A monitor screamed a single note of alarm at the head of the bed. Kyle looked across at the boy. Who had reared up too, tousled, sweat-peppered and mumbling.
Had
she made it across?
He stared down at the dying figure in the large bed. Its eyes opened, and in the lapis lazuli irises he saw the faintest trace of the beautiful male actor, Chet Regal, the adopted son. The receptacle for Sister Katherine in 1975, on her second Night of Ascent since the siege of St Mayenne in 1566.
He looked into the eyes of what poor Irvine Levine had called the ‘mother of abomination’.
It opened its mouth and tried to speak. A claw more than a hand jerked at him. The head came off the darkening sheets.
It spat blood onto its withered chin. Choked out a sound so pitiful and foul, Kyle wanted to turn away. It gargled. Then into its eyes seemed to come a realization so terrible, it throated a thin scream. Of rage. Which turned to grief just as quickly. It whimpered. ‘Emperor . . . reign . . . thousand . . .’
To make sure it never would, Kyle emptied the Gloch into its face from three inches away, until there was no longer much of a face left at all.
The flare guttered to a spark and he turned to see what would come to put an end to him too.
*
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Three rows of human remains in their white chairs continued to stare at Kyle from their hollow sockets. Mouths open, he imagined they were cheering him. Beyond them, the doorway in his torchlight was no longer hectic with the Blood Friends.
The great house was silent. Empty.
The child in the bed looked feverish, delirious, its eyes stayed closed. Kyle began to cry. He wasn’t sure why, but he said, ‘Sorry,’ to the boy in the bed. Maybe because when he awoke, he’d see his dead father, or surrogate mother, or whatever it was so ruined and ravaged beside him. He’d better call an ambulance. One might even be on its way. The police too; there had been a lot of gunfire. He looked about the room.
What to do?
He sat down, cross-legged, and played the torch beam from an empty handgun over the faces of his dead audience.
He wondered if even they would believe him; what he had seen and done and knew to be true. His eyes wandered around Max’s endgame. The final scene of the film. Would anyone believe him? That he shot Chet Regal repeatedly while he was incarnating into his adopted son. That Regal wasn’t actually an A-List actor, but a woman who called herself Sister Katherine, the leader of The Temple of the Last Days, who carried a bloodline that began with the Blood Friends in sixteenth-century France.
‘Jesus Christ.’ The catalogue of his downfall reeled through his mind with an unexpected clarity. He felt so cold he began to shiver. Because the authorities would find the last of The Seven in that room: Sisters Gehenna and Bellona. Old women bled out by mouths now unseen and unable to be held accountable. Mouths that could not possibly exist, not according to natural law. Max was no longer around to back 526
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him up. Nor Jed. Their remains were both outside too. If there was anything left of him, Max’s bones might even be found amongst the ancient remnants of a pig, draped in antique ecclesiastical garb.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said, to the eyeless, the open-mouthed gawkers on the white art deco chairs. A good crowd was in tonight. Very patient. Kyle started to laugh. There was no Susan, or Gabriel, or Martha to defend his actions. He looked back at the door.
Kyle lit up a cigarette. Wiped at his eyes. There would be stories in True Crime Bestsellers about the sound of dogs and pigs inside a celebrity’s mansion, days before a gun battle, after which bodies were found. Only he and a child would be found alive inside the empty building. The child had been unconscious and endured horrendous nightmares while all of the killing took place.
Sweet
. The police and the FBI would look at his rushes and talk to Dan and question him. Then they would question and interrogate and cross-examine him in prison for years.
Decades
. He would be studied like the Blue Oak Copper Mine killer, Brother Belial. History had repeated itself neatly, but so horribly. Every trail led back to him. The obsessive film-maker, broke, harbouring grudges, who investigated The Temple of the Last Days. Indisputably crowned by his final narration to camera in his flat about the conspiracy madness of Chet’s connection to Sister Katherine.
Good ole boys Conway and Sweeney, those decorated police officers, would confirm his avid interest.
He had been used by Max, and Max and the survivors had been hunted and destroyed by Chet, who had been used by Katherine. The Karmic Wheel had not so much turned as gone backwards.
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As resigned as the condemned after sentence has been passed, he pondered the paintings in Antwerp and the story they told. Could they help him out here?
The Saints of Filth.
Believed lost, now untraceable, owned by some Belgian family of guardians he didn’t even have a name for.
He was fucked. Royally fucked. He was going to end up in San Quentin with Charles Manson. He was still alive. They could shuffle about the common room in orange boiler suits and ankle chains and talk about
The White Album
. But first, would he be forced to recount this tale in court? Would the footage be beamed around the world? The police would trail through the rushes of Clarendon Road, Normandy, Arizona and listen to the strange interviews, see the murky glimpses of those things that would be dismissed as special effects, before the footage was sealed in an evidence room. One man’s horror-show lunacy. One day someone would make a documentary about him making the documentary, about how his mania and delusion had led to mass murder; a bloodbath that included a celebrity and his staff. It all ran through him like a film on fast forward.
While he was in the mood, Kyle looked at the gun and wondered again if he should put the end of the barrel inside his mouth and toe the friggin’ trigger. But the gun was empty.
‘Shit.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it in his pocket.
Eventually he got to his feet, lit another cigarette, and did what he did best: he held the camera aloft and began to film the room in night vision. When he stood over the defunct body of Chet, this pharaoh without a sarcophagus, he said a few lines for a film that would never include its final scene.
‘Maybe Max was right. We revere the narcissist. Because 528
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maybe the biggest stars are those who shed oceans of blood for their immortality. The freaks that consider themselves immortal. Who thought they were Gods. Tyrants for sure.
But never Gods.’
Outside the penthouse, the Blood Friends were gone, but their marks remained, as did their stench. Those that died in the battle left only their miserable bones behind. But Kyle filmed it all; he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he could not shake the notion that it was the last scene for his final film. His masterpiece. His legacy. The director’s cut that would be con-signed to performances in courtrooms and evidence lockers.
When he found poor Jed, he wiped the grip of his empty Gloch and placed it next to Jed’s remaining hand. When he got to the remains he assumed were Max’s, there was no pig, no Unholy Swine to be seen, and he stepped over the mess of bone and dust and rags without a word and carried on downstairs.
On the ground floor, he switched off the camera’s night vision function and took his time going from room to room.
He might as well make the most of it before the distant sirens called for him.
When the batteries were dead, he went out through the hole in the glass and sat outside on the patio in the sun. Lit up and drank his last bottle of water. His head throbbed and his eyes stung. His hair was caked in dried sweat. He nearly threw up.
There were no sirens.
Nothing.
No one came.
He walked back down the drive and climbed over the 529
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peacock gate. Waited in the street. But still there was nothing, and no one came for him with cuffs. He heard cicadas and crickets, but no sirens, or even a single car engine. The vapour trails of three planes marked the blue heavens. He decided he better make a call for the kid in the penthouse; he’d need help soon enough, perhaps for the rest of his life. Kyle fished his phone out of his rucksack.
And had another idea. One that came so suddenly he gasped.
He smiled for what felt like the first time in his life. If no one had heard the gunshots and screams way out here, issuing from inside a large sealed building, then perhaps no one was coming to arrest him. Kyle looked at the gate. There were no alarms to be tripped. There had been no closed-circuit surveillance. Paramedics would come when he called them for the kid, but if he called from a safe distance, anonymously, the medics would radio the police soon enough after their arrival here, but he needn’t be around to explain the impossible mess they’d discover stuck to their shoes.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and as the smoke drifted from his mouth and passed in front of his eyes, he followed the line of thought. It was even plausible that no one would connect him to the slaughter. There wasn’t a great deal left of Max to analyze and his DNA and dental records wouldn’t be on file in the US anyway. And Max would have erased or artfully concealed anything that might have connected him to the murder of Chet. Who could connect Kyle to Jed? Conway and Sweeney didn’t know Chet Regal was the clean boy. And who else was left alive with any working knowledge of the production? Dan, Finger Mouse . . . so only his mates back in England then . . .
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‘Christ!’
Kyle frantically called the most recent number in his calls list. When a sleepy voice answered the phone, he said, ‘Finger Mouse! Thank fuck! Tell me you haven’t uploaded the film.
For Christ’s sake! Tell me you haven’t!’
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