“We prepare her, Lord Almadu!” Carlane shouted. “Come to us, Lord Almadu! Asertu, Lord Almadu!”
“Asertu, Almadu!”
One by one the men mounted the hooker, changing off to hold one of her wrists or ankles. Kelly, his mind professionally analyzing the scene while simultaneously being horrified by it, noted that that was five of the six rapists. He was fully aware that he’d found the answer to the Ripper case. All he had to do was wait to find out who the actual killer was and who the sixth rapist was. Not that it really mattered, every single person in the building was an accessory in fact and all five of the rapists would be tried as if they were the murderer with all the rest probably getting life sentences. And Carlane, of course, was going to the chair.
Assuming that anybody found out about this and lived. Since he was pretty sure he was a dead man. He really didn’t want to be raped, though.
“Fthagna!” Carlane shouted. “He comes for his sacrifice! The master comes!”
The fifth acolyte quickly pumped to a finish and got off the moaning woman as the water in the opening began to boil. Kelly lifted himself up to get a better look and then wished that he hadn’t.
He told himself that he was not going insane but he really wanted to. The thing rising up out of the water was nightmare. His mind kept trying to put a definitive stamp on it, to compare it to something that it found familiar, but it was too strange. A fish face, with glittering, glowing green eyes that were alive with malicious intelligence. Gill fringe, a line of raised dorsal spines, connected by webbing. Tentacles around the mouth. Huge, humanlike, arms with broad hands and webbed, taloned fingers. It was monstrous, the humanoid torso at least six feet across. More tentacles sprouted from the shoulders and down the back or maybe it was long, moving, hair. None of that described the blasphemous unreality of the monster.
At last it had emerged from the opening, which was just about wide enough for it, and stood on two frog feet, rearing thirty feet in the air. Then it bent down and its member engorged and Kelly suddenly understood who or what the last rapist was.
Dolores let out a shriek of pain and fear as the massive member penetrated her and began thrusting, hard. The beast’s bellows overrode her screams, though, drowning them out as it thrust and thrust and finally came with a last bellow.
Kelly cracked his eyes open and then closed them again as the the thing inserted one talon in the woman’s belly and ripped upward, crunching through the sternum with a sound like popping plastic wrap. Dolores let out one final shriek of agony and then the thing inserted its hands in her chest and ripped it wide open, reaching in and tearing out her heart to stuff the beating organ in its mouth.
Kelly tried not to retch at the wet smacking sounds as the thing fed on the entrails of the hooker. Finally he couldn’t control it and threw up all over the rotting wood in front of his face.
“Lord,” Carlane said, as if that had signaled him. “We bring you another soul. Not as good as that one, but a soul nonetheless. Bring him,” he added to the acolytes.
Barb had followed the edge of the bayou, skirting behind houses and even into it once around a boathouse, headed west. But there were no vehicles, or signs of life, in that part of town. Finally, she slipped along the side of a house, blessing the apparent absence of dogs in the town, and peeked out into the road.
There were men in the square, about seventy yards away, and others were moving from house to house, obviously searching for her. Some were too close for comfort and they were clearly moving faster than she was. She could try to hide, but she suspected they would find her; there just wasn’t much good concealment around.
But she was well away from the men and in a much darker area than they were. And they were using flashlights which would blind them. Even the men in the square were in light, some of them standing by trucks with the lights on. One of the trucks was pointed, vaguely, in her direction. But it had only one good light, the other pointing up and to the side. And the good light was casting a pool of light about half way between her position and theirs. Her best bet was to cross to the other side and head east along the bayou. Try to double back on them. Maybe find one of the cars or trucks with keys in it.
She held the AR-10 down by her right side, away from the searchers, and put her head down, then stepped out away from the house, slowly.
Keep your head down. Move slow. Not stealthily, just slow. Bend over. Change your silhouette. People see what they expect to see. Use shadow, there’s one, a tree casting a faint shadow of reflected city light. Don’t hurry. Be the night. I’m invisible. You can’t see me.
It worked. It took her nearly five minutes to cross the open area but there were no shouts of discovery, no fire from the searchers. Whatever their prior plans, after the chaos she’d left in her room they had to be planning on killing her on sight.
She moved quickly past a house and then down to the bayou, turning left and hefting her weapon. She figured that she’d come back up by the old church where she’d be behind them.
She had made it to the area behind the courthouse when she heard the first scream. There was a faint crack of a whip along with it. And it seemed to be coming from the church.
“Oh, no,” she muttered. “You are not going to play paladin. Get the hell out. Bring reinforcements.”
She moved forward cautiously, skirting the group by the square with extreme care, then moved up away from the bayou as her skin started to prickle. Suddenly she saw herself chained, Mark on top of her thrusting into her like she was being raped. She forced the image out of her mind and gave a brief prayer asking forgiveness. She knew her demons and she’d fought them her whole life. Suddenly there was another flash, the pleasure she’d felt twisting that one bastard’s arm completely out of socket. It hadn’t been, strictly, necessary. She’d let her anger take charge.
She kept moving, fighting vision after vision. Herself submitting in a way the Bible never envisioned. Killing the stupid bitches like Marcie Taylor’s mother that thought they were so holier than thou. Sex with Kelly, him taking her, hard, holding her hands down and using foul language, her own voice joining in.
She couldn’t stop the visions, but with each one she said a prayer for forgiveness, asking that the Lord exorcise the demons that worked on her soul and help her fight the evil that lurked in every human. The Lord would forgive her her occasional bad thought, she knew that. Jesus had died for mankind’s sins and he had promised forgiveness to his chosen people. She had lived her life as a Christian, a good Christian lady and wife. She had brought her children up as good Christians, and good people, which sometimes wasn’t the same thing.
“Lord, give me strength,” she prayed, quietly. “Come into me and give me the strength of Samson, the wisdom of Solomon, the power of Jesus to forgive my tormentors even as they nail me to the cross. Help me, Lord, please, in this hour of my need. Be my staff of strength.”
She was at the wall of the church without even realizing that she’d been walking there, her mind half in reality and half in the land of vision. But as she stepped up to the church she felt a shock, hot and cold running over her body as if cold fire had been poured into her veins. For just a moment she wondered if she’d gone insane, as bestial bellows echoed in the church and through the night swamp. But then the visions were gone, replaced by a sense of peace. But not an inactive peace. She felt a presence urging her to something, something vital, and she slipped to the side looking for what she knew must be there.