I can feel Ricky's frenetic presence looming. He's like a swarm of gnats, a murder of crows, rising up against the building and finding a million ways in towards me. I push against the guard's hand while he orders me, "Stop. Stop right there, buddy."
He reaches for his walkie-talkie and spits out some code numbers. I push against him again and he shoves me back harder this time. The rage wants me to lash out. Ricky wants me to kill.
It's almost unbelievable that the guard can't feel the forces of the cosmic game swirling around us, moving us, presenting us as opposing pieces. How dim can someone be?
"Hold it, buddy, just stay there. We need you to answer some questions about your girlfriend. It'll only take a few minutes."
The windows rattle. The storm has found me again.
I check my rage and perform the way I did in prison, with a cold and crystalline vision and efficiency. I don't get angry. I don't want to hurt this man.
But I do. I swing my forearm around and strike him in the jaw under the ear with my elbow. There's a large cluster of nerve ganglia there, and I know what it feels like to have it struck. The guard sees nothing but solar wheels as the inside of his skull ignites. He flails backward, unconscious.
More guards appear at the far end of the hall. The ER nurse starts screaming. Other patients, despite their illnesses and wounds, back away to the wall as one. A twelve-year-old with a broken nose flinches from me. His mother moves in front of him in a display of maternal protection. She's breathing heavily, pale in the muted light, her breasts heaving. She waits for me to rape her. The glass keeps shaking.
I stomp through the automatic doors. I climb into the Coupe, buckle up, rev the engine until it's shrieking, throw it into gear, and burn out.
I light up. I check the rearview. The front of the hospital is full of brash action and motion and shadows.
Linda wasn't even on Ricky's list but she might as well be counted a victim.
His, her father's, Satan's, or mine.
10
The moon goes into hiding. The dark squall circles and dives and breaks against the side of the Mustang. The night is blacker than the back of the Devil's eyelids. I can feel Ricky and his circle out there performing their death celebrations. I send myself to him. I let him lead me there. I drive blind for a while, eyes shut, letting my other senses guide me.
I turn left, I turn right, I hit it on the straightaway. I spin out in gravel and branches of swaying trees scrape the hood. I don't let it dissuade me. I keep my eyes closed tightly. I listen to the oncoming traffic blaring, speeding past. I head south for the bay. I burn rubber, I take wide curves. The magnetic pull of the earth carries me. I drift for a half hour, blind as Gary Lowers.
When I open my eyes, I'm skidding on a beach lane covered by sand.
He's close. I picture him clearly. He's got a little campfire going and he's practicing moves with his knife, deciding on what he's going to do to the next kid. It looks like he's going for the internal organs. He's drilling on how to cut out the kidneys, the liver. He's going to make haggis and feed it to everybody at the next party.
The other Knights of the Black Circle flicker in and out of being, by the light of the fire. They provoke him, they drape themselves around him, full of love, full of hate. The blade swerves, slashes, and severs. Ricky's breathing heavily. He dances on the sand as the waves crash behind him.
I see him stabbing down, slashing, sneaking up, pulling hair, tonguing, nipping. I crack the window an inch, and I can hear him singing another heavy metal song, the trite lyrics almost laughable.
A half-mile away I tumble to an old south shore graveyard. I drive slowly, keeping an eye out. Ricky's flames ought to lead me right to him, unless he's caught on. He might've kicked the fire out by now.
The dead have their grievances. They tug for my attention. They pack decades-dead names into my head. Above it all I hear Gwen's voice, asking to be fucked.
I park and get out. The graveyard is nothing more than a few scattered stones. The area's been eroded, the graveyard buried by sand and sawgrass and snow fencing. I drift past the headstones, waiting for Ricky and his circle to fall down on me from the dunes. I light a cigarette and smoke, leaning back against the side of the Mustang. I give myself up to them. My headlights offer a dim illumination. The clouds of night birds have followed me to the shore, and they fill the infinitely forbidding sky.
Gwen's screams are muffled into moans. A part of me loves the noise of it, the honest and true depth of despair and pain. I'm human. I crave human anguish. My own or anyone else's.
It's probably a trap but I rush across the beach hunting for her. The moon wants to see, so it finally appears and turns its face down to us. I stumble over seashells and detritus hidden in the sand. My mother appears in the dark, pointing out where I must go.
I come to Gwen huddled inside a dug-out hole behind the dunes. Gwen is naked, bound by rope, covered in blood, a gag firmly placed in her mouth. The bandages binding her many cuts and scratches from last night's love- and hate-making have unfurled in the wind. There are fresh razor slashes on her belly, breasts, and thighs. The trails of pulsing blood have run together, but I know the cuts spell out words, covenants, pledges. The waves continue to crash, foam and seaweed rushing towards my feet.
Maybe he's left her here to show that he owns all of my women. Maybe it's meant to infuriate me, or to turn me on.
Gwen weeps and whines at me. She kicks at the bottom of the pit. The words on her burn so brightly that I have to shade my eyes.
Breaking from the dark, two members of the Knights of the Black Circle snarl curses at me in their language of desecration. They're each holding a straight razor. I'm surprised they've become so banal, but the longer they stick with Ricky the worse it will become. As they claim and reshape him, he is doing the same to them. They walk toward me, slow and cool and casual as the front line of grunts in Lucifer's army.
Gwen's moaning is a contrapuntal to the quick breathing and occasional bursts of laughter coming from Ricky's boys. The music of it fills me. I stand my ground and wonder if Linda is dead yet. If Gwen will even care now, one way or the other.
She's managed to work the gag loose. She has a very powerful tongue.
Regardless of the fact that she's probably bleeding to death at the bottom of a pit, Gwen still gives orders. She tells me to murder them. She demands that I do it slowly. She promises to fuck me righteously if I kill these two bastards. She burns with hellish radiance.
I search for Ricky. I can feel him, watching, those demented, savage eyes are on me.
I call to him. I do it silently and I do it loudly. "Ricky!"
The knights raise their blades and slash at the air. Streaks of fiery red hang the air. The whistling razors make me think of my father teaching me to shave when I was a kid. It's one of the few memories of him that make me grin. My face covered in shaving cream and my old man bonding with me, weapon in hand, passing on yet another ritual of manhood. This one about power too. A nick at the jugular could bleed you out in minutes. My mother watched closely. My mother stood guard, in the bathroom door. He was afraid of her. He had every right to be.
Ricky's boys know how to invoke even greater evils than themselves. Their recitations and invocations draw more and more energy from the world. Ricky's fire dims, the moon dulls, and Gwen weakens in her struggles. My knees tremble but I keep on my feet.
They leap and glide forward almost as if on wings, swinging the razors back and forth, the arcs of red light flashing across the sand. I duck and bring my knee up into one groin, turn and elbow the other in the face. They grunt with almost childlike wonder. They know pain but not this kind of pain. This is a mortal, human pain, something that's usually beneath them, except when they influence and come to be influenced by mutts like Ricky Kelso.