Malevolent (36 page)

As the thing in the burgundy dress stretched ten feet in height, it became even less substantial. Its opaque flesh shifted and briefly lost human form altogether. A voice erupted from it like ocean liners colliding, overpowering even the blown speakers.

“THIS SHALL NOT HAPPEN.”

And yet it did, and the demon grew more and more ephemeral.

The mailman had slumped half off of his forgotten victim in his effort to stave off the earsplitting sound, and now Griffin could detect his mindless scream of agony at the paring knife sticking from his leg.

Patty was twisting and turning the blade, but seemed dazed, weakened, as if sleepwalking through the counterattack. Griffin reached down, grabbed an arm and pulled her out from under the collapsing mailman.

The air wheezed from her lungs between coughing jags. Her color gradually returned, her neck bruising in the ghostly image of a man’s hands.

Griffin shut down the stereo. The comparative silence felt thick, marred only by the bleeding mailman’s gasps of shock and pain, and the harsh, almost rhythmic breathing patterns of everyone in the room.

“How ya doing? I’m Griffin.”

She stared at him. “Huh?” Tapped her ear.

“Oh. Sorry about the…” Griffin waved in the general direction of the stereo. “It was the only thing I could think—”

“Get them.”

It was a small, directionless sound which Griffin finally traced to the burgundy haze near the ceiling.

Still moaning pitifully, the mailman folded into himself and wrapped both hands around the handle of the knife sticking from his leg.

Griffin hooked an arm around Patty and pulled her closer to him. She uttered what sounded like an exhausted sigh.

“…going to let them get away…this?”
the formless voice said.
“…were any kind of man…wouldn’t…’appened.”

Huge tears slipped from the mailman’s tightly clenched eyes. Moaning louder now and leaking blood to the floor, Matthew Porter raised himself to a seated position. He grabbed hold of a curtain with blood-slickened hands and pulled himself painfully to his feet.

“That’s more like it,” said an encouraging voice from the burgundy figure in the corner. The thing had once again achieved human form and wore an inhuman smile.

Chapter Sixty-One

Tim hand’t found any matches in the chapel and now he knew how cockroaches felt when the light went on.

Still hunched low in front of a row of pews, he expected Vincent Applegate to be waiting for a panicked scurry.

He forced himself to wait. And listen.

Vincent cleared his throat, a sound that echoed sharply. “I know my church,” he said. “I know that there’s only one way in, one way out. So why don’t you stop hiding like a mouse and we’ll discuss matters man to man.”

Sounding entirely reasonable for a man with a gun that he’d already fired repeatedly.
 

The minister’s voice had come from the chapel’s entrance
 
He was apparently distrustful of the feeble yellow light thrown from eight sconces, four on each wall, and reluctant to move into the shadowy room until he’d exposed his target.

Tim could guess why.

There were three aisles. Whichever one Vincent took, Tim could take as many steps in the opposite direction up another aisle. By the time the homicidal reverend made it down to where he
used
to be, Tim would be out the door.

Neither could make the first move. Stalemate.
 

Tim could only hope that Vincent’s reluctance held. He had his head tucked between his legs, eyes riveted to the floor, ears perked for the slightest sound. For some reason, he’d put the shirt back on that he’d used to smash the window glass, and he could feel tiny shards grinding into his flesh like stray hairs after a barber’s clipping.

He forced himself to raise his head to see a corner point at which the ceiling met two walls, and orient himself. He was squatting stiffly in front of perhaps the fourth pew row from the altar. One narrow side aisle looked to be eight feet away, maybe ten. Vincent, providing he hadn’t stealthily advanced, was at least a dozen pew rows behind him and some eighteen or twenty feet to his right as Tim faced the back of the church. Chances are, he’d come down the center aisle so as to get a good view of the pew rows on both sides.

And now he could hear the chilling sounds of soft footsteps
snicking
down the polished floor of that main aisle as though to prove Tim’s point.

Vincent was coming, though taking his sweet time about it. Didn’t matter. Tim’s thigh muscles were too locked up to move.

The soft footsteps ended.

Tim shifted slightly, a painful and failed attempt to flex his bent knees. Cold needles raced up his limbs, a sensation he tried ignoring long enough to take a frantic guess at the number of steps Vincent had taken before stopping.

Four? Five? That might put him, say, eight pews away. Or less.

“At least tell me how she was, my wife. Rate her for me, compared to the other married women you’ve had. For odd, proud reasons I’m hoping to hear a higher score.”

Tim had startled at the voice, had almost toppled over on haunches nearly numb with fatigue. He’d been right, though. The minister’s voice sounded eight or nine pews away.

“You are not wanted here.”

If the church hadn’t been so deathly still at that moment, Tim would have never heard the voice that seemed to have drifted into his consciousness as though from another conversation, another time.

A much more substantial sound, that of shoe leather against hard, polished floorboards, startled Tim back to more immediate concerns. Tim sucked air noisily just as the footsteps died again.

“I heeeaaaar you.” An uneasy blend of tension and excitement in the minister’s soothing lilt.

Sirens wailed in the near distance.

With the double doors unguarded, what was stopping Tim from duck-walking down the side aisle, slipping out the door and throwing himself out the front door of the church? Sure, he might get hit by flying lead, but it was a sure thing if he stuck around here much longer.

Well, for one thing, his numb legs wouldn’t hold up. He’d stumble and fall and be an easy, pitiful target after just a few hobbling steps.

The soft leather
snick, snick
sounded again. The footsteps melodramatically slow, the gunman too cautious to be beat by a rushed retreat. Tim had to come up with something else.

Quickly.

He couldn’t look up. His brain kept sending him the paralyzing image of Vincent standing right down the pew from him, smiling as he took careful aim.

He had to do this, had to do it now, but he could barely force his mouth open. His jaws were stiff with such bear-trap tension that he could barely pry them loose. When he spoke, nothing came out. He had to clear his throat first, a bark of a sound that rang off the walls and hard, varnished wood like a gunshot.

“I’ll bet you’d like to know who helped me,” he said, eyes clamped.

The relative strength of his voice shocked him, but if it startled the man with the gun, Vincent didn’t indicate it with detectable movement. Tim winced in expectation of the bite of the bullet. He forced his eyes open and made himself track the sight line along his pew to the center aisle where Vincent Applegate was indeed lining him up for an easy shot.

What the hell. Tim stood, his cramped legs screaming. Then he laughed.

Tim had never told a bigger lie in his bullshit life than he did with that laugh.

Vincent’s gun hand was steady, his arm extended, one eye shut so the other could line Tim up along its blunt black barrel. Tim wondered where that barrel was centered and giddily asked himself if he’d prefer that death shot in the heart or brain.

Neither, he decided. He very much preferred to live.

Chapter Sixty-Two

She was laughing softly, a sound full of kindness and understanding. It brought tearfully to mind their happy early years together before the drinking, the complacency, the Reverend Frost.

“Look at you,” she said gently. “You’re not going to make it, are you?”

His scalp bled from the lamp cut and hurt like a motherfucker, but Laney was referring to the paring knife protruding from his leg.

Matthew had somehow drawn himself upright to face the frightened couple clutching each other in the dining room. He clutched the blade with both hands and tried removing it from the fiery wad of flesh, muscle and tendons locking it in place. The crashing wave of pain and nausea stopped him, made him lean against a wall before he fell.

His feet doing an involuntary shuffle, he looked down to find them sliding in a slick puddle of his own blood.

Laney saw it too, and sadly shook her head. “You’ll never finish your task, hon. You’ve disappointed me so.”

Something boomed like sustained thunder in the distance.

His dead wife flickered and dimmed like a flashlight with old batteries. “It’s all over,” she said. “The police are on their way and they’ll catch you and put you away and eventually strap you onto a gurney, but that won’t be for years and years. In the meantime, they’ll keep you all alone in a small cage until death becomes your final comfort.”

Matthew looked from Laney to the young man and woman on the other end of the room, holding on to each other like lovers.

“Look at them,” Laney said. “You see that terrified look in their eyes. They see a monster. An abomination. Do you see their fear?”

“No,” Matthew choked. He wasn’t like that. He stumbled a step toward them, holding out his hands in peace. They must know him as he really was, a much more complicated man than they’d seen.

“Get back,” the pudgy man barked.

“It’s not my fault. She made me do it,” Matthew cried, pointing out his dead wife with a trembling finger.

He saw no sympathy, only dazed loathing from the bearded man and the attractive woman he held so close.
 

“Stay away from us.” The woman looked shell-shocked.
 

Matthew’s glance fell to the ring of bruises on her neck. Had he really been responsible for that? He couldn’t remember why it had seemed so important to hurt her like that. If he could just apologize…

He took a step forward, teetering on legs he could no longer trust, and had to grab a drape for support. It ran red where he gripped it.

Laney shimmered now like a burgundy tongue of fire. He looked to her for the final possibility of comfort. “I have to know. Did I kill you on purpose—or was it an accident?”

She smiled sweetly, a smile he could feel in his mind rather than see in her blurred features. “I
know
you have to know, deary. I know how important it’s been to you all along. And now you’ll have all of eternity to figure it out, lover.”

He stared at the knife buried in his leg.

“Come on, you can do it,” Laney wheedled.

She was almost gone by then, just a hazy figure which, like a word you repeat endlessly, lost all definition if he stared at it too long. He took hold of the knife handle with two shaky and blood-slimed hands and pulled it out. Like Arthur claiming Excalibur, only it hurt like a motherfucker. It made a sucking sound as the blade popped free, and he watched his blood pouring down his leg and washing over the naked flesh of the knee where his postal uniform shorts ended.

His world went black around the edges as a wooziness that was both more and less than pain started to take him away.

“Perfect.” All that remained of her voice. “Now you know what to do next, don’t you?”

Of course he did. The last sounds he heard were the shocked cries of the nice couple and the gleeful chortles of his own dead wife as he plunged the blade into his throat and prepared to meet his unmerciful eternity.

Chapter Sixty-Three

“I guess you don’t care if I acted alone or not,” Tim said to the man in the center aisle. The man holding the gun. He said it with all of the flippancy he could fake with dry mouth and hammering heart.

The gun lowered a half inch and Vincent’s aiming eye opened. “I already know who helped you. My own so-called loved ones. They’ll answer for it later.”

Tim felt a pinch of relief in realizing that Vincent at least hadn’t wiped out his family—yet. “I’m not talking about them,” he said. “I mean the others.”

Here’s where it got dicey. Madmen, Tim figured, loved conspiracies. It might be possible to keep Vincent interested by teasing him with a little information. Interested enough not to plug him. The downside—and there was plenty of
that
—was that he’d have to give up on trying to convince the minister of the truth, that he, Tim, was entirely innocent of whatever the hell it was he was being accused of. Second downside, he’d have to come up with something to say that kept Vincent intrigued. Even a master bullshitter like himself might have a problem with that.

The gun wavered. Tim could hear the shrill moan of a breeze in the distance. He tried waiting the gunman out, but it was too unnerving. He said, “It wasn’t just your family who helped me cheat with your wife. Several members of your congregation covered for us too.”