The General strapped down the sodomite’s free hand and began gathering up the tattoo equipment. The sodomite screamed again to be set free, but the General ignored him. Besides, the sodomite hardly had any voice left at all. He’d been in the chair for over a week.
And despite the circumstances, even the Prince was impressed with the sodomite’s work on the doorway—or at least he seemed to be. The power of the first doorway, the one on the throne, was already beginning to weaken by that point. The General had only allowed the sodomite’s right hand to be free and kept his Beretta pointed at his head the entire time he used his needle. That was one of the reasons the tattoo had taken so long to be completed; for even though the General was strong, his arm often grew tired from holding the gun for long stretches at a time.
The General often wondered if the police knew about the stolen tattoo equipment—older equipment, which the General had taken from a storage closet at Canning’s. He also wondered if the sodomite’s lover ever suspected his beau was having an affair at the tattoo parlor behind his back. Granted, the Prince hadn’t allowed the affair to go on long. Just long enough for the sinful sodomite to touch and kiss the doorway; just long enough for him to let his guard down and become attracted to the young man who called himself Ken Ralston.
But now, over two months later, the General understood that with the discovery of the corrupt lawyer the FBI was involved. And thus the General also understood that, now that the authorities had ditched the drug cartel connection and were calling him a serial killer—Vlad the Impaler, how ridiculous!—well, now things would have to be different.
No, the General would not be able to go back to West Hargett Street tonight. Instead, he would have to spend the evening in consultation with the Prince.
The rose. Cindy Smith. The cast party Friday night.
Perhaps the Prince would like the General to recruit his soldiers elsewhere?
Edmund took a deep breath. He needn’t worry about all that now, for unlike the beginning, when the General had to decode and interpret the messages from the Prince on his own, now the General could ask the Prince directly, and the Prince would answer him with his visions.
As long as the doorway remained open.
Edmund returned the rose to his book bag and sat admiring it for a long time—its stem, a long wooden stake planted in the earth; the flower itself, the scrubbed-white flesh of the next soldier.
A sign, he heard the General whisper in his mind. The female most certainly has given us a sign.
Chapter 31
Markham sat at the Resident Agency conference table with a sea of paperwork stretched out before him. He had been there all day; had gone home at 2 a.m. the night before and only punched four restless hours of sleep on the clock before returning to the Resident Agency at eight.
The story broke about four hours later, and was all over the news by three that afternoon—Rodriguez and Guerrera, Donovan and Canning, all connected in their grisly, graphic glory. The FBI had learned that the groundskeeper who’d discovered Donovan in the baseball field was going to talk. He’d already made a public statement and was scheduled to appear on Nancy Grace that evening. Gurganus would roll soon, too, he knew. They always did.
Word had also gotten out about the writing on Canning’s chest via “a reliable source inside the investigation.” Markham thought most likely one of Sergeant Powell’s boys had been paid off, and unless the FBI didn’t deal with this information swiftly, the vultures were going to be a pain in the ass about it. Fortunately, an FBI spokesperson had tem- porarily dodged the question during a press conference earlier that afternoon.
However, rather than seeing all the media attention as a roadblock, Markham relished the idea of getting the vultures to work for him for a change. And so the FBI decided to release an incomplete image of the writing found on Billy Canning’s torso. They would also alter the image to include a line of what they said “appeared to be Romanian.” This would satisfy the press and let them run with the Vlad angle while the FBI followed their real leads.
Their real leads.
Markham stared down at them on the table. It had taken him, along with Schaap and their consultant in the classical studies department at NC State, over twelve hours to put it all together—feverish bouts of research and discussion broken up by long stretches of waiting while this or that theory was followed up on. This last follow-up had taken the longest of them all. Markham had been waiting to hear back for almost two hours. But that was all right, for this last follow-up was indeed going to be the last—the most important piece of the puzzle; the proof that all his research had not been for naught.
“Here it is,” Schaap said, entering. “I got one of the boys preparing the JPEG scan as we speak.”
He handed Markham a copy of a black-and-white photograph.
Markham studied it for an entire minute without speaking.
“I’ll call Alan Gates,” he said finally.
But he did not move.
No, for the moment Sam Markham was content to just sit there gaping, unable to believe his eyes.
Chapter 32
The General stepped into the farmhouse, set the alarm, and checked his watch. If the second act had started on time, he thought, Macbeth was about to get his head cut off. The General thought this fitting, as he himself was about to consult the Prince’s head in the Throne Room.
All part of the equation. Everything connected.
The General was happy to finally be home. True, the young man named Edmund had only stayed to watch the trap open for Duncan’s descent into Hell, but still it had seemed like a long time. Jennings had stopped by to see how things were going and told Edmund to go home; said he was a good worker and gave him a key to the tool closet—“for the summer theater season,” he added.
This sat well with Edmund Lambert, even though he would soon have no more need for the tool closet. In fact, he would be long gone by the time summer theater began. After all, it was during the summer that the Prince was prophe-sized to return—as in the old days, in the burning sun of noontime, bringing war and pestilence and destruction with the deadly harvest of the summer solstice.
And the Prince’s army would return with him; would be waiting by the doorway, ready to serve and pave the way for what was to come.
But someone would be waiting for the General, too. And once he was able to pass through the doorway, they would be together again. In this world or that? Well, the General wasn’t sure.
The General smiled and went upstairs, undressed in the bathroom, and stepped into the shower. And as he scrubbed off the remains of his day-life, his mind soon wandered to the young woman named Cindy Smith.
He turned up the water as hot as it would go and stood there watching as it reddened the flesh beneath the large tattoo on his chest and stomach. And when the doorway became numb with the pain, he closed his eyes and imagined Cindy Smith in her spirit costume, rising up from the trap and stepping through his flesh from the depths of Hell. He opened his eyes and gazed down at the doorway, half expecting to see her there with him in the shower, and saw instead that he had grown erect.
He would need to consult the Prince about all this; would need to look for her in his visions, in the flashes of images and sounds. He hoped he would find her there, and began to wonder if the she wasn’t part of the equation, too.