Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Page 9

  She picked it up, clicked over. It was Dale’s number, but the voicemail, when she listened to it, wasn’t any words at all, just a rasping, choking sound, and then terrible silence.

  As little as two days earlier, and she would have called the police. It would have been her first thought. She would have tried Dale back and, when he didn’t answer, dialed his work, and then the police. But not that night. That night she just ran, leaving the computer open to a picture of a flayed man on a flayed horse, leaving her notebook open to the last page where she’d written Where is the red church? Ran out into the rain to her car, and from there drove to where she knew, knew in her guts and in her bones, the call had come from.

  ***

  She tried to call Dale three times on the way over, but the phone just rang and rang until voicemail picked it up. Each time she heard his voice telling her to leave a message, her heart jumped, thinking she was wrong, thinking he was okay after all, and then it sank again, deeper each time.

  When she parked in front of Gorman’s building, the phone still pressed to her ear, rining once more, Dale’s voice telling her again to leave a message and he’d get back to her, she slammed the door and stood in the rain for a minute. Her hair was soaked, spilling water down her back. She stared at the metal door, wondered if it would open this time, wondered what she’d do if it didn’t.

  But it did, it pushed open under her silent touch, just as it had before; as if the building was abandoned, no one home. But as she stepped inside, above the thunder of the rain pounding against the walls and the roof, she could hear a distant sound. The ringing of the phone against her ear, and the answering chime, the song they’d danced to at the Drum Room on their second anniversary, coming tinnily from down the dark hall ahead of her.

  No light filtered down from upstairs, none worth mentioning came in through the door that hung half-open at her back. The hallway was dark as pitch. She hung up, and held her phone up in front of her, lighting her way.

  The door at the other end was painted red, something she’d never noticed before as it’d always been lost in shadows. It was metal, like the front door, and when she rested her hand against it she found it warm to the touch, as though the heater was on full blast on the other side. There was a smell, too, not like blood, or not like what she thought of as being like blood, but a hot, moist smell, like the reptile house at the zoo.

  The door had a place for a padlock, but it was gone. Just a metal latch held it closed now, and she knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, in the part that remembered watching scary movies, that she shouldn’t go in there, that it was a trap, that something terrible and irrevocable was waiting on the other side of that door for her and that all she had to do to survive was to run, run now, run away, and everything would be fine.

  But of course it wouldn’t be fine. She was too far into the movie for that. Leaving now, she was just delaying it, making it worse. What was behind that door, whatever it was, it was her fault, somehow. She knew that now. It was her bed, she’d made it, and now all that was left was to step inside and lie in it.

  She opened the door.

  Take the red knife and cut red bread!

  Yvonne had never been in a slaughterhouse, so she couldn’t compare the smell of the room to one. It smelled like snakes to her, like terrariums and like the red, watery blood that used to pool in the bottoms of the Styrofoam containers of meat that her mother brought home from the grocery store.

  The room was lit by old-fashioned fixtures set in the wall. They made a low buzzing, and at first she thought that’s what she’d heard when she almost went down the hall earlier. But no. Not them. Flies.

  There weren’t that many of them, the ones that slipped in when the doors opened, the ones that crept in through tiny cracks in the building, but there were enough. They buzzed from place to place, settling on the black streaks of dried blood, settling on the bodies that hung from the wall in front of her.

  What had she imagined she would find? Mad science labs from old movies? A surgical suite, laid out for plasticizing bodies like the ones upstairs? No, those weren’t the bodies. Those were just sculptures, expertly done. Just practice. Gorman’s voice, “These aren’t ready to be shown.” Here was the real thing. Bodies laid open, organs pulled out. Hearts still beating, lungs still pumping. Heads looking from side to side, eyes blank, gray. Breath whispering in and out in soft little moans and gasps. How did he do it? How were they still alive?

  She scanned their faces, willing herself not to count them, willing herself not to feel guilty when she breathed just that much easier when she saw that Dale’s face wasn’t among them. Then, her phone buzzing in her hand, Dale’s number flashing up on her display, and from the shadows a movement, tall and moon-faced, and the flash of a knife.

  Ten years in the city, and she’d always felt safe. But her father felt safe in the country, in the small towns where they’d lived, and he still kept a gun under the front seat of his truck. She’d taken self-defense courses for six of those ten years, and while they had mostly taught her how to avoid bad situations, how to look confident, to keep her cell phone handy, they’d also taught her how to use an attacker’s superior weight against him, how to turn a knife blade, how to break a wrist.

  The knife clattered to the concrete floor as Gorman stumbled past her, nearly colliding with his own pieces, his own sacred relics. By the time he turned around the knife was already in her hand, and then it was in his stomach, turning, sliding up, and he was choking on blood.

  If it had happened even a week earlier, it probably would have ended there. As it was, she carved and carved until Dale went on a break at work and noticed his cellphone missing. Until he called her to see if he’d left it at the apartment and got no answer. Until he drove home and found her gone, found her notes beside the computer. Until he called her editor and her editor called the police, who found her, bloodied and smiling, in the midst of the sculpture that had once been Wade Gorman. “He’s a saint,” she kept repeating as they dragged her away. “An angel.”

  Author’s Notes:

  “The Red Church” was the third of my stories to appear in a Word Horde anthology, following on the heels of “Ripperology” and “Walpurgisnacht.” And while I wrote it for Ross Lockhart’s Giallo Fantastique, at the time I first started working on the story, I hadn’t actually seen very many Giallo films, though I had been doing a lot of reading about them.

  Known to most as the Italian ancestors of the modern slasher film, what I love about Gialli aren’t the justly-famous kill sequences, but the sense of menace and strangeness that the best of them carry in every note and every frame. Because I hadn’t seen many of them when I wrote it, “The Red Church” is probably inspired less directly by any particular Giallo than it is by their spirit, and by a variety of other sources. The title and the verses that break up the tale are all from Albertus Magnus, though I first came to them by way of Manly Wade Wellman. The images of the bodies pulled apart come from my obsession with wax anatomical models, and from Mike Mignola’s drawings of same.

  This is another Kansas City story, and is set right near where I was working at the time that I wrote it, though I took some liberties with the geography. The Union Prison Collapse is actual history, though in real life there’s just a sign up on the corner to commemorate it.

  Remains

  Mostly I remember the room. The way it smelled. The dank, sullen darkness, hot and thick with closed-up summertime sweat. I remember the voice of the round-faced little guy the parents had gotten to preside over the thing. Not a priest, not technically, but someone who was willing to do the job.

  I don’t know why that’s what always sticks in my mind, rather than what came later, after all hell broke loose. I never wanted to be doing anything like that ever again, but when Jenny asked for my help I couldn’t say no. Not after what she’d been through. Not when she told me why.

  ***

  The house we pull up in front of is one of those hou
ses. Dark and sullen, like the room. If it was a kid, you’d take one look at it and say that it’d been abused.

  I flick my cigarette out the window onto the wet pavement, and try not to think too hard about why we’re here, but I do anyway. I wonder if the house would look the way it does to me if I didn’t know its history. If I was just walking by on the street, would I give it a second glance?

  It’s a big house, and it was nice once, but it’s sat for awhile now in disrepair, untenanted. It belonged to Dr. Terrence Kinter, who lived in it for almost forty years, during which time he killed over four dozen kids. No one’s really sure how many. When the police finally caught him they found hundreds of bones buried in his garden and under the floorboards of the house. Little tiny bones.

  While he was still alive he worked at the hospital up on the hill as a “consulting physician” for awhile before he retired. His neighbors all thought he was eccentric but benign. After his arrest, several people were shown on the news saying things like, “He seemed like such a nice old man.”

  When he was arrested he didn’t come easy. He fought two officers, gouged out one’s eye and bit off the other’s ear. They had to beat him pretty bad before they were finally able to get him cuffed.

  He never made it to trial, but it wouldn’t have mattered much, I don’t think, because he started admitting his crimes as soon as they had him in custody. Admitting them, and all sorts of other things. He said he was a sorcerer, and talked at length about casting enchantments to lure kids to his house, and about the things he’d conjured up and fed with their hearts.

  A lot of people wanted him to fry. Figuratively speaking, of course, since we had lethal injection. Jenny was one of them. She’d have happily killed him herself, if an embolism in his brain hadn’t beaten her to it only two days after he was arrested.

  That was over a year ago, and since then her only consolation’s been that at least her son was the last of Dr. Kinter’s victims. Until now.

  In the last two weeks, two kids have disappeared from this same neighborhood. No trace. Nothing. Officially, it’s nothing. Missing persons still, not even the business of homicide, not yet. And definitely nothing to do with Kinter, who’s been dead and in the ground for a year and change, case closed.

  But Jenny heard about it, about the kids, and she remembered Kinter, and this house, and so she called me. We’d been partners for awhile, back when I was still on the force, and we kept in touch. She’d heard about the exorcism, she knew that I’d, well, maybe not believe her, but at least humor her. At least go with her.

  She was right.

  So here I am, standing out in the damp afternoon, looking up at Kinter’s old house that’s been empty all this time, because who wants to live in that house, you know? It’s going to be bulldozed, one of these days, and they’re going to put something else up here. A Ronald McDonald House, they talked about, which seems kind of like a bad idea to me.

  “Jenny,” I say, and she pulls her eyes off the house and looks at me. She looks excited and scared, like she’s sitting in the seat of a roller coaster just as it crests the top of the big dive and maybe she wishes she hadn’t gotten on in the first place. “What are we expecting to find in here?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “Do you think ghosts... I mean do ghosts...” But she doesn’t know what she means, and she just trails off.

  “I don’t know anything about ghosts,” I tell her. “I don’t know anything about anything. What I want to tell you is, probably, we’re not going to find one damned thing in there. You know that, right? This is probably a wild goose chase?”

  She nods, and I can see that, while she’s trying to believe it, she doesn’t, not really. “I’ve got to see,” she says.

  “I know that. I understand. I just need you to be prepared.”

  She nods again, and we start up the front steps.

  The door’s got a padlock on it. Bolted on and obviously newer than the wood it’s attached to, but Jenny has a key that she got from somewhere, I don’t ask how. She unlocks it, pushes it open, and we go in.

  Inside, it doesn’t look very much like a house anymore. The floorboards have been torn up in so many places, exposing the dark dirt underneath. It’s hard to look at that dirt and not see makeshift graves; finger bones and eyeless sockets poking up. Accusing.

  The furniture’s been shoved aside, piled into corners to accommodate the excavation of the floors. A wall’s been torn out between the entryway and the living room.

  Only the shape of the place makes it still seem like a house, the walls still standing upright, making rooms that are just jumbles of displaced furniture and gaping wounds in the floor.

  “Christ,” Jenny says. She’s never been in here before, any more than I have. They wouldn’t let her be involved in the investigation. She puts her hand to her mouth, and if I’m imagining the graves dug under the floor, picturing the bones hidden down there, then I can only guess what she must be imagining.

  I put my hand on her back. “I’m okay,” she says around her hand, then lowers it to her side. “I’m okay.”

  The entryway lets into the living room on one side, and a sort of parlor on the other. There’s a piano in the parlor with one of its legs broken off. This stuff was all slated for sale, everything that was left in the house, but the public outrage over Kinter’s crimes delayed it, and then it just got forgotten, I guess.

  In the living room is a huge fireplace that must be the structural center of the house, its base sinking into the ground and the bricks of its chimney extending up beyond the roof.

  Beside the fireplace is a picture on the wall, though all the others are gone. It’s not a big one, just a sepia-toned photograph. It shows Dr. Kinter sitting and staring straight at the camera. He’s already an old man in the picture, for all its apparent age. The way he’s dressed is as old-fashioned as the picture looks; a top hat and tails, with his knobby hands folded on the head of a cane. His eyes look tiny and black and seem to catch some light from outside the frame, glinting like the eyes of a doll, or the eyes of a shark.

  “That’s him,” Jenny says, walking over to get a closer look at the picture. Her next move is so sudden that it startles me. She grabs the photo off the wall and hurls it, gilt-frame and all, across the room like a discus. I flinch as it hits the far wall and shatters, glass tinkling to the floor.

  Jenny takes a deep breath, shuddering, like someone who’s been held under water too long. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s harder than I expected.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “I can look around. You know I’ll tell you if I find anything.”

  “No,” she says, and then reaches out a hand without looking and lays it on my arm, giving it a squeeze. “No, I’m okay. But thank you. For coming. For everything.”

  I pat her hand. I’m keeping my own hands from shaking, but only by trying very hard. I don’t want to set her on edge any more than I know she already is, but the place is getting to me. I want very badly to draw the pistol out of my shoulder holster, but I content myself with shifting so that I can feel it against me, reminding me that it’s there.

  Not that it’ll necessarily do me any good. I’ve never heard of any ghost stories where guns were terribly effective.

  “Should we look upstairs?” Jenny asks. I nod and she heads out of the living room, keeping close to the wall to avoid the hole in the floor.

  The stairs are still intact, and they squeak under us as we go up. The rooms there look more like real rooms, though all the accoutrements are gone. Just beds and chairs and an empty trunk. The only unpleasantness is a bedroom with an exterior lock on the door, and little child-sized furniture inside. It’s nothing Jenny and I aren’t expecting—we followed the investigation, after all—but it still causes us both to recoil, like from a bad smell.

  We’re standing at the top of the stairs, and I’m watching Jenny’s face, watching her start to accept that there’s nothing here,
that these two kids don’t have anything to do with Kinter, don’t have anything to do with her son, and that she’s only torturing herself by being here, and I’m trying to decide whether to say anything to her or whether to let her process it at her own speed, when there’s a sound from the chimney. A dragging, scuffling, thumping sound, like something got caught in there and can’t get out. Then something else, a thud, and then a sound like bare, heavy footsteps on the boards downstairs.

  Jenny is already moving before I can reach for my pistol, taking the stairs two at a time. The pounding of her feet on the steps drowns out any other sound I might hear, and I can’t do anything but draw my gun and follow her. She careens around the corner, into the living room, and I see that she’s got her gun out, too, and then she says, “Shit,” and she’s gone again.

  I get to the living room a bit behind her, and she’s already past it into the dining room. I see what she saw, that the living room’s empty, but I also see what she missed, that the photo’s back on the wall.

  The glass is still broken out, bits of it hanging in the bent frame like ragged teeth, but it’s been hung back up. By a human hand, I wonder, or a ghostly one?

  I start to go over to it, I don’t know why, to take it back down before she sees it maybe, when there’s a godawful crash like a rockslide from the dining room and a startled noise and a curse and two gunshots and I run around the fireplace after the sound.

  For a second I don’t see Jenny. When I do, she’s lying in the dirt below the dining room floor, her gun gripped in both hands and held straight out ahead of her. She’s staring at a big hole in the side of the chimney, and there are bricks and pieces of bricks scattered all over what’s left of the floor.