“No, I meant your collection.”
“Yeah, and check out my gear.”
Arranged at the back of the basement was a stereo system the likes of which Melanie could never imagine. Steel racks on floor points housed dual amplifiers the size of televisions, a Nakamichi DAT recorder, an ARCAM CD player, and a line conditioner. Another stand on points supported a turntable with a linear air bearing tone arm. A subwoofer separated two giant electrostatic speakers the size of doors.
“It’s my pride and joy,” Zack said. “Gotta leave the equipment on all the time or else it sounds edgy. A high end turntable blows compact discs away; most people don’t realize that. Of course, most people don’t spend twenty five grand on a stereo system.”
“Twenty five thousand?” Melanie whispered.
“Sure. Music’s my only pleasure. I don’t cut corners.”
“They must pay you pretty well to clean up the church.”
Zack laughed faintly. “They don’t pay me nothing, ’cept they give me the room for free.”
“Then how can you afford…all this?”
“Odd jobs,” Zack replied. He walked over to one of the shelves and removed something. “Check this out.”
Melanie held it as if it were an icon. The CD version of Killing Joke’s Nighttime. It had been autographed by all members of the band, and inside was a Polaroid of Zack standing next to the lead singer.
“Believe me now?”
Melanie nodded. All she could say was: “Wow.”
“You can have it,” he said.
Melanie was shocked. “Oh, no, I could never take—”
“If you want it, take it.” Abruptly, he turned away.
Melanie’s sense of cordiality lapsed. She knew she shouldn’t take it, but she did anyway. An autographed Killing Joke, she thought, awed. She would frame it, hang it in her room. “Thanks,” she said.
She perused his record shelves. He had everything. Everything by Killing Joke, PIL, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, Monochrome Set, Section 25, Strange Boutique—the old stuff that actually predated Goth. Melanie couldn’t believe the coincidence: her and Zack’s musical tastes were identical. He had everything by anyone good.
He played some records and discs for her. The huge speakers threw a soundstage that overwhelmed her. Zack seemed to enjoy playing the music as much as she enjoyed listening to it. He mustn’t get much of a chance to show off his system, not in a town like Lockwood.
They listened for hours. She never got bored, but eventually she grew fidgety. She knew what it was. When her high wore off, it left something like a hot anguish in its place. She felt steamy, tingly.
She’d never done anything so overt before.
She took his hand and led him toward the bed.
“You’re very special,” he said, and turned off the lights.
—
Chapter 16
Providence, Erik thought.
He had to travel in snatches, at night. Several times police had passed him—he’d thought sure that was the end. How much longer would his luck last?
He’d lay low tonight, he couldn’t afford not to. He’d driven past Lockwood on Route 13, to the woodlands. An old trail he remembered took him deep into the forest belt. They’d never find him here. He covered the van with brush and mud, to mask its lacquered white paint.
He knew he still had a few days.
He felt buried in the dark woods, closed in. Buried, he thought. Brygor-wreccan.
I’m a peow, he thought.
The moon shone down. Its light pinkened the dense forest.
Doefolmon, he thought.
Wiffek.
Fulluht Loc.
In the moon’s bleary light, he saw it all again. He saw them. Bathing in glee, in blood. He saw their mad feasts, their supple bodies, and their longing eyes and lust which stripped him of his soul.
They weren’t people. They were monsters.
How many graves did I dig for them?
He’d watched their mad rituals many times. They’d held the hüsls down on the slab, slicing them open like fish and reeling out their entrails, oblivious to the mad, lurching screams. Erik knew that he would hear those screams forever. The more privileged wreccans tended to far worse matters, things which beggared description…
Dohtor, he thought.
Dother.
Dother fo Dother.
He’d seen it once, in the night mirror. That had been many years ago. They’d held his head by his hair and made him look, had pried his eyelids open with their fingers. It had been like being drowned in blood.
Afterward, they’d nearly fucked him to death.
«« — »»
Martin dreamed of Maedeen.
Even within the dream, he knew it was a dream. Because he would never do such things for real. Never.
He loved Ann more than he’d ever loved anyone in his life. Cheating on her would be like cutting her. It was unthinkable.
So what did the dream mean?
He was walking around in the darkness, in the woods. Tinder crunched—the moon’s pink light led him through a labyrinth of trees.
He’d been assigned a task. A cramped clearing formed, bright in moonlight. At his feet lay a pile of bags. They were regular plastic garbage bags, Hefty kitchen size. They’d been tied up and neatly stacked. Martin didn’t know what was in them, and he didn’t care. He only knew he was supposed to do something with them.
He was supposed to bury them.
It hadn’t taken long to dig the hole. Next, he was placing the bags, one at a time, into the hole. Though small, they felt heavy, weighted. He calmly filled the hole with the little bags, then covered them with earth. Plap, plap, plap! came the sound as the dirt landed on the plastic.
When he was done, he leaned against a tree and flinched. There was something wet and slick on the tree trunk. In the moonlight, his palm looked black.
Faint giggling bubbled out of the dark.
Martin wended back into the woods. The giggling sounded a lot like girls, children perhaps. The moonlight was bright and pink.
He stopped, tried to focus.
A slender, naked girl was leaning over. Martin stared fixedly. He looked at her long, slender legs, the sparse cleft of fur where they joined. The fur protruded as she leaned over further, and he could see the bottoms of her beasts jiggling slightly as her arm moved in some arcane task. This sudden sight—this beautiful nude girl pristine in moonlight, her buttocks jutting—aroused Martin at once. But when she turned, he gasped.
It was Melanie.
“Hi, Martin,” she said. She was grinning.
Embarrassment flooded him. Her nakedness faced him without inhibition. This was a seventeen year old—his lover’s daughter. Yet she seemed to sense his unease, she seemed to delight in it.
“You want to fuck me, don’t you?” she queried.
“No,” Martin said, but the reply was roughened, dry.
“Don’t lie to me, you pig. When I was leaning over a minute ago, you wanted to take your cock out, didn’t you? You wanted to walk right up behind me and put it in me. Didn’t you?”
“No,” Martin croaked.
She grinned back at him. She looked just like Ann, the same breasts and nipples, the same legs—just younger. In one hand she held a pail, but it looked old, rusty. It looked like a relic. In her other hand she held a crude brush, like a paintbrush.
That’s what she’d been doing. She’d been painting something on the trees.
Then two more girls emerged from the darkness. They, too, were naked. Their matching grins seemed obscene, their bodies tinted pink. They each held a brush and a pail too.