Lindsay gagged, then felt her throat clamp shut.
The skin on Mark’s back was gone—torn away in long strips, leaving the glistening bulges of his muscles. Blood ran over the waist and butt of his shorts. Bits of flesh hung like thick threads at his sides. Lindsay couldn’t bear to see it, so she looked away into the corner, and there she saw the shredded strips of skin, which were piled up like a bloody old shirt. She swallowed hard and looked back at the boy.
Mark completed his turn, the smile still on his face. “I’m going to take my time with you, Little Jacky. I’ve got a lot of payback due me.” Mark stepped forward, his chest expanding with a deep breath. “Do you remember what I did to that girl in Denver? Oh, she had it easy compared to what you’ve got coming.”
“Stay back,” Jack said, his voice like a loudspeaker in Lindsay’s ear. “Paralyze,” he muttered. “Freeze muscle and bone and blood and breath.”
“Knock it off, Jacky,” Mark said, taking another casual step forward. “You don’t have any of your pills and potions now. Word magic isn’t going to do a damn thing against me, and you know it.”
Lindsay didn’t understand what she was seeing. Mark’s back was gone. How could he even stand up?
She mumbled his name against the thick palm covering her mouth.
“Oh,” Mark said, fixing his clear blue eyes on hers “you still don’t get it, do you? I’m the monster of this story, little girl. Lester Krohl knew it. Barbie sure as hell knew it. I’m the Big Bad Wolf, the Boogeyman, and the Wicked Witch all rolled up into one.”
No, Lindsay thought, her eyes filling with tears. No, it isn’t true.
“Tell her, Little Jacky,” Mark said, seeming to take absolute glee in the moment. “Tell her how very bad I am.”
“He’s one of Lucifer’s spawn,” Jack whispered. “He is evil and darkness manifest unto man. He is a moral disease.”
“And you and your buddies tried to break my groove,” Mark said, now only five steps away. “How long’s it been? Ten years? Twenty?”
“You have been under the brotherhood’s guard for thirty-two years.”
“Well, time flies,” Mark said.
Jack pulled Lindsay back a step and then another. Her head was growing light. She tried to keep from fainting, but already, the room behind Mark’s back spun and blurred, though he remained in focus, unchanged.
“Now, where’s that buddy of yours?” Mark asked. “We can’t have a party without him.”
“I’m here, boy,” Doug Richter said from the open doorway at Mark’s back. He held a shotgun against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel.
“Well, what have you got there?” Mark asked. “A pop gun?”
“Yes,” Doug said. He pulled the trigger, and Mark was lifted from the floor. He crashed into the wall with a sickening thunk and slid to the floor.
Lindsay screamed against the palm, only to find it hastily removed. Jack’s arm left her throat and his hands were clutching her shoulders, pushing her forward.
“We don’t have much time,” Jack said, ushering her away from Mark’s body toward Doug. “Come on. You can’t be here.”
Doug lowered the shotgun and threw out an arm, blocking Lindsay and Jack. “She can’t leave. Not yet,” he said.
“She isn’t safe here,” Jack said.
“What’s happening?” Lindsay cried.
“We have to finish this,” Doug continued. “He has to be bound. We can’t just leave him, and I can’t do this alone.”
Lindsay looked from Jack to Doug. The two older men now appeared heroic to her, not frightening.
“Yes,” he said. Sweat covered Jack’s face, and his burly torso trembled. “Yes. But we have to protect her.”
“The icons,” Doug said. “Do you have them?”
Jack nodded. He drove a hand deep into his pockets and pulled out half a dozen of the strange corner pieces Lindsay first saw framing Mark’s window. She remembered their placement. Mark had said they were meant to keep evil out, but he lied. They were meant to keep evil in, meant to keep Mark trapped in his room. She understood that now. But what difference did it make? Mark was dead. Doug shot him.
“Put her in the coat closet,” Doug said, jabbing his finger at a door on the far side of the foyer. “They won’t protect her from all sides, but it’s all we can do now.”
Jack latched on to Lindsay’s biceps again and dragged her painfully across the foyer to a simple-looking door.
“I want to go home,” Lindsay cried. She wanted to see her parents, wanted to hold them and know they were okay. “Can’t I just go home?”
“There isn’t time,” Jack said. He pulled open the closet door and flung Lindsay inside. She hit the back wall hard, and her legs nearly went out from under her. “If we don’t stop him, he’ll come for you, because you know what he is. He won’t let you or your family live, and he will make you suffer.”
Jack flipped one of the icons into the air and caught it with his right hand. With a powerful thrust, he drove the metal spike into the corner of the doorframe. With a violent twist, he screwed it into position. Another icon flew into the air, and this one also found itself buried in the wood. He knelt down, intending to affix additional metal pieces to the lower corners of the door, but paused.
The floor was marble.
Lindsay watched with mounting panic. She didn’t want to be a captive of the two old men. She lunged forward, but Jack threw a palm toward her, struck her chest, and sent her back against the wall.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he growled.
“Let me go!” she screamed. She didn’t know what they were trying to do, but she didn’t feel safe, and she wanted to leave! Again she charged for the opening.
Jack sprang to his feet, and she hit his chest. It felt harder than the wall at her back. She shrank away. The man returned to his knees.
Seeing no other choice, he drove one of the icons through the grout separating the wooden frame from the marble. He twisted it deep, but it stuck out at an odd angle, not nearly as even as the ones higher up. Jack repeated the action with the last icon.
“Those won’t keep me in here,” Lindsay said.
“They aren’t meant to keep you in,” Jack said, standing up and rolling his shoulders as if trying to break tension out of them. “They’re meant to keep him out.”
“He’s dead,” Lindsay said.
“No,” Jack told her. “He isn’t. He can’t be killed, not by metal or magic or any other weapon of man. He can only be contained. His influence is eternal, from the beginning of time until the sun burns dark.” He looked away toward Doug, who stood over Mark’s body.
The tall man held a round piece of metal like a massive coin in his hand, and bounced it on his palm.
Jack turned back to Lindsay, his face set in an expression of deepest sorrow. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “You’re going to see some terrible things.”
16
Lindsay watched Jack step away from the closet. He closed the front door and threw the locks, fixing the chain with a decisive clack. Then he stomped across the room, waving his hand at Doug Richter.
“Give me the brand,” Jack said. “And shoot him again. He’s playing possum.”
“Now why would you go and tattle like that?” Mark asked from his place on the floor.
Startled, Lindsay leaped. Mark couldn’t be alive. The shotgun blast had hit him in the middle of the back—a back flayed of its skin, ripped away by Mark’s own hands.
She shivered and retreated to the wall. She could still see the whole room. She saw Jack catch the metallic talisman in his hand, saw Doug snatching at the floor for his shotgun. And she saw Mark. Mark who should be dead. Mark who wasn’t human.