He tried, at the ticket booth, just to have one more chance to be indignant. When it was his turn, he said, “I believe there are two complimentary tickets in my name, Francis Matthias.” He felt Alice’s hand tighten on his arm and he was getting ready for the ticket seller to tell him that he was sorry there were no tickets waiting for him when the man handed them over. He took them, a little surprised, and handed them on to a smiling Alice.
“Look at that,” she said. “You’d gone ahead and arranged the tickets all along.”
Had he? Maybe he had on his way out, or maybe he’d said something in passing at the beginning. He didn’t remember. But since the
tickets were free, Alice insisted on getting popcorn. The theater was pretty full, but there were two seats together right in the back, where they liked to sit because of his vision, and she snuggled up against his arm when the movie started.
So a good night. Or was anyway, until the movie started. It wasn’t even an old B-movie, though it had been made to look that way. But he could tell it wasn’t—the fashions were just a little off, modernized, and the hairstyles were definitely not right. He’d seen enough of the old Hammer films with Alice to know what a B-movie looked like, and clearly this guy had, too. It was, he had to admit, as smart or smarter than most of the Hammer films, and, if you could relax into it, as enjoyable, too. It was cheesy, a little bit, but there was something else there. The guy who played the Witchfinder was great, and he played it almost like the sheriff in an old Western. Or he seemed at first like the hero from a Western, and gradually he seemed to be more and more like a villain, and then he began to seem like the Devil himself. The monster went back and forth, too, between being sympathetic and being totally over the top and relentless, and that made it very hard to know what to think about it—which turned out to be good and to hold his interest. It reminded him of his feelings about the witch trials—were they evil men or were they just terribly confused men trying to do their best? One moment you saw the monster identifying with others, trying to make sense of what it meant to be human, and the next he’d torn a child’s head off, just like that, without a second thought. He’d winced when that had happened, and Alice had tightened up, too, but what ran through most of the audience was incredulous and slightly nervous laughter. “Outrageous, dude!” called out one guy a few rows in front of him. Maybe he was too old for this, he thought for a moment, grumpily.
But people around them seemed to be having a great time, moving very quickly from laughter to fright and back again, and it was infectious. He found himself giving in to it, relaxing for once. Yes, probably better not to have said anything to poor Heidi Hawthorne. If he
had he’d probably have terrified her and kept her from sleeping. Better to leave her alone and think of her at home, sleeping like a baby.
Heidi stared at the packet, wondering how long she would last before she opened it. Maybe just having it with her would be enough for a while, just knowing that she could fire it up if she wanted to, that it was there as her safety net.
But I’m already falling
, she thought.
Don’t I need the safety net now?
Beside the bed Steve whined, his ears flattened.
“Don’t worry, buddy,” said Heidi. “It’s going to be okay.” But even she didn’t believe it. She held the packet in one hand, just held on to it, and waited. Then she went into the kitchen and got out the aluminum foil and tore off a piece of it. She folded it smaller, then carried it back into the bedroom. She sat cross-legged on the bed, the tinfoil and the packet and her lighter just beside her, calling to her.
She switched on the TV and started surfing channels, but nothing was on. Absolutely nothing. She left it on one of the shopping networks, which was running an ad for huggable hangers.
Why the hell would you want to hug a hanger?
she wondered. Turns out they were fuzzy for some reason, and that the claim was that clothes would never slip off them. A woman wearing a pair of ugly slacks kept demonstrating them, showing how even if there were a major earthquake your clothing wouldn’t fall off the hooks. They came in packs of twenty-four, and you could get them in sage, or bright gold, or black, or silver, or turquoise, or…
“And to complete your collection,” said a strangely distorted voice, “meat hooks.”
Her head snapped up. On the screen now was a bald man wearing an eye patch, half of his head covered with hideous burn scars. He was stripped to the waist and was grotesquely muscled, tattoos with intertwined demons winding over his chest and arms. In one hand he held a meat hook by its wooden handle. His other hand
gestured around it, outlining the blade. The inside of the hook had sharp, smaller barbs lined backward along it.
“Now, most meat hooks, you get them hooked into a good chunk of flesh and wave them around a little and the meat just slides right off,” said the man. His voice seemed to be subtly slowing down and speeding up, as if she were listening to a warped record. “But not this little baby. Once you get this one in, it just isn’t going to come out.”
He walked over across the stage, the camera slowly following him to a door marked five. He slowly opened it and entered. Inside was a poorly lit room where a man sat with his arms tied behind his back and his legs duct taped to a padded vinyl chair. His hair was rumpled and his face red, and duct tape had been stretched around his mouth to gag him, too. It took her a minute to recognize that it was Chip. Her boss was famous! He was on TV!
As the tattooed man approached him, Chip struggled and tried to speak through the gag, his eyes vivid with fear.
“Now, take a situation like this,” said the tattooed man. “We’ve all been there. You’ve got a man tied up in a chair. You’re not quite ready to dismember him, but at the same time he’s at one side of your deserted factory space and you want to drag him over to the other side of your deserted factory space because you’ve got your dismembering and other torture equipment over there and, plus, the video camera is already set up. It’s just more convenient to have him over there.”
He bent over a little, pressed his hand against his back. “But your back has been acting up on you,” he claimed, looking straight into the camera. “Not too bad, not enough so that you’re going to have to let this guy sit for a few days, but enough that you don’t want to have to bend over to pull him.”
He raised the meat hook in the air, and the camera closed in on it, held it in close-up.
“Ordinary meat hook and a guy struggling as much as this little bastard’s going to be in just a moment and it’ll slip out maybe five,
maybe ten times on your way over,” his voice said from off-camera. “You’ll have to put so many holes in the guy that by the time you get over there that it’s hardly even worth it—he may even be dead by the time you arrive. And you won’t have captured any of it on film. What fun is that?”
He put one hand on Chip’s triceps, caressing it, examining it.
“But a meat hook like this,” he said. “Well, it’s special.” He raised it high in the air and with one sharp, hard movement drove it through Chip’s upper arm. Chip screamed into the gag, his eyes rolling.
Holy shit
, thought Heidi. “Now that,” he said, grabbing the handle and jerking on it, “that’s a meat hook that’s secure.”
She jerked awake.
Shit
, she thought.
More nightmares.
Almost without thinking, she reached for her lighter.
It was close to noon before Francis got out of bed. Once up, he puttered around the house a while. He looked for Alice, but she’d left a note on the counter saying she had an appointment with her hairdresser and wouldn’t be back for a few hours.
Hairdresser
, he thought, somewhat amused.
How could a woman go revel in B horror movies by night and go to her hairdresser by day?
But maybe that was why he liked her.
He looked for the paper but it wasn’t in the kitchen, not in the living room either. Maybe she’d taken it with her, but that didn’t seem like something Alice would do. No, she knew he liked to read his paper in the morning. Admittedly, it wasn’t actually morning anymore, but to him it still was. In a way.
He poured himself some cereal and sat down at the table to eat it, then looked around for the paper again. Maybe she’d forgotten to bring it in? He opened the door, but it wasn’t on his mat. Sighing, he went back inside and put on a shirt and some trousers and then went down the stairs in his slippers, but it wasn’t downstairs. And when he opened the door and looked out on the porch, it wasn’t there either.
So he trudged back upstairs, irritated now, and put on his shoes and jacket, grabbed his wallet. A little walk wouldn’t hurt him, he told himself. True, usually he took a walk at some point in the day, but why should he have to take it before he’d read his paper?
He walked out the front door and down the street. The low
autumn sun was out and shining. It was still cold outside, but not as cold as it had been a few days before. It was completely bearable. He walked down the street, through beautiful historic Salem. A little trash-ridden, admittedly, but still beautiful. He crossed the street and moved toward the downtown—probably likely to be crowded with tourists, considering it was a Friday and that Halloween wasn’t all that far off, but he knew at least he could get a paper there. He’d just try to avoid all the somewhat irritating witch tourism. Or try, at least, not to let it make him angry.
He followed Mason Street as it curved along the perimeter of Mack Park. At the edge of the park he came to a Labrador retriever who had been tied off to a
No Parking
sign. The poor animal had gotten tangled up so much that he could hardly move.
“Are you all right, boy?” asked Francis. The dog just wagged its tail. He looked around for its owner, but didn’t see anybody—probably off in the park somewhere. But if that was the case, why not take the dog along? Francis let his arm fall limp and brought it close to the dog, watching for signs of aggression, ears dropping back or lip starting to curl, but the dog just sniffed his hand and licked it.
“Maybe I can untangle you,” he said. “How would that be?”
He knelt down and helped guide the dog’s legs free of the leash until he was doing all right again. One of the dog’s haunches was a little bloody and at first Francis was worried, looking for a wound, but no, there was nothing there. The dog wasn’t cut; something had gotten blood on the dog. Maybe it had been in a fight with another dog? It didn’t seem like the fighting type.
The owner hadn’t come back by the time the dog was untangled. He looked at the dog’s collar, but there wasn’t an address, only a phone number and a name: Steve. Steve, what kind of name was that for a dog? He stood up, patted the dog on its head. Steve just wagged. Well, if it was still here when he came back, maybe he’d take it to the house and call the number on the tag. He chuckled. That would certainly surprise Alice, him showing up with a dog.
He continued down Flint Street and crossed over the river and the local train tracks, then from there went left on Essex Street until he was at the Salem Library. For a moment he thought he’d remembered wrong, but no, there it was, partly hidden behind the bicycle rack: a newspaper vending machine.
He put his coins in and opened the gate, took the top newspaper. He’d folded it up, put it under his arm, and was starting to walk away when he suddenly stopped stock-still, wondering if he’d actually seen what he’d glimpsed. He stood there on the sidewalk and unfolded the paper. The headline read:
SECOND NIGHT OF RITUAL MURDER IN SALEM
“Oh my God,” he said aloud, and read on.
For the second time this week, Salem was rocked by murder.
Virginia Williams, 51, a lifelong resident of Salem, has been arrested for the murder of her husband, Keith Williams, 60.
“I don’t know what came over me,” responded Virginia Williams to this reporter’s question, “Why did you do it, Virginia?” She continued: “I mean, I really don’t. I was resenting him or whatever and then suddenly things got out of hand. But I don’t even remember that happening. It was like I just woke up in a pool of blood.”
Mrs. Williams is alleged to have repeatedly stabbed her husband with a knife, and then to have mutilated and dismembered the body.
Friends of the Williams’s report that Keith allegedly had a history of abusive behavior. Said one, who wished to remain unidentified, “I’m not surprised. He sure had it coming.”
This murder is remarkably similar to the murder of Jarrett Parsons by Maisie Mather earlier this week. Police have speculated that there is a link between the two murders.
Said Chief of Police Jon Greenhalgh, “We have no doubt that a connection exists between the two murders, and even that Mather and Williams conspired in the killings.”
When asked to be more specific, he mentioned that both women had carved the same symbol into their own chests before committing the crime.
According to another member of the police department who wished to remain anonymous, there is clear evidence that these murders are ritual in nature.
Police are not releasing more specifics at this time.
Another murder
, thought Francis,
and this one identified as ritual.
Or rather as a second night of ritual murder, so that means the first was ritual as well. Williams, though—it was a common enough name, but not a name readily identified with the witch trials. Maybe Maisie Mather had just been a coincidence. But still, it was strange. And he was willing to bet that the symbol they’d carved in their chests was a symbol he’d seen before: the Lords symbol.
Lost in thought, he hurried home.
Steve?” Heidi called. She was lying slumped on the bed, a little confused. “Steve?” Where was that dog? She’d had him just a minute ago, had been walking him, and then things got a little blurry, a little fuzzy, and well, she was back here now, wasn’t she, and so Steve must be around here as well. That made sense. No, Steve was a good dog. He was around here somewhere. She didn’t have to worry about him. He probably was just in the kitchen or something, sulking. And she was okay now, too. All she needed was another hit or two, something to calm her down, and now she felt great.