The Heaven Trilogy (87 page)

The sound invaded his dead sleep relentlessly and he rolled . . .

But that was where the gong show ended. Because he couldn’t roll.

His eye cracked and he saw nothing but black. A monster pounded on his skull, sending shafts of pain right down his spine. He tried to lift his head, but it refused to budge. Slowly his focus returned.

He knew then that he wasn’t in his bed. He lay on his side in a corner, with his back to a wall. He was naked except for his underwear. Dark stains ran down his belly and dyed his white briefs red. Blood.

He’d been beaten badly by those two shadows. Jan tried to lift his head again, and this time it came up for a full second before falling back down to the carpet with a dull thump. He paid for the effort with a spike through the brain, and he clenched his eyes against the pain.

He was still in the nightclub, he’d seen that much. Mirrored walls and a dark dance floor. Colored lights cast eerie hues of red and green and yellow across the black carpet.

A voice sounded to his left. “He’s waking, sir.”

Hands grabbed his arm and pulled him into a sitting position. He wavered there for a moment and then lifted his head. This time he got it all the way up and rested it on the wall behind him. A figure stood by the bar to his right, replacing a phone in its cradle. The man had a bandage around his shoulder. Jan hadn’t done that, had he? Not that he could remember.

The black-suited man seated himself in a folding chair and looked at him without expression. Jan’s reflection stared back at him from the mirrored wall. Blood ran in long fingers down his neck and chest from red-matted hair.
What are you doing here, Jan? And where in the devil are you?

He answered his own question.
You are in a place owned by Glenn Lutz because Helen asked you to come.

A door to his left smacked open and he turned only his eyes, favoring his aching head. It was Glenn. The man seemed to glide more than walk. His hands hung huge with thick fingers that curled like stubby roots. Jan looked into his eyes. They were nothing more than black holes, he thought. A chill spiked down his spine. The man was smiling and his crooked teeth looked too large for his mouth.

“Well, well. So the preacher has decided to join us again. You’ve been here for nearly a day and finally you have the courtesy to show your face.” He stared at Jan, obviously relishing the moment. “I apologize for the blood, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to cooperate without the right persuasion. And stripping you . . . I hate to humiliate you but . . .” He paused. “Actually, that’s not true. None of that’s true. I love the blood. Even if you’d agreed to everything up front I’d have beat you bloody.”

Helen was right. This man was evil. Possessed maybe. Jan uttered a silent prayer.
Heavenly Father, please save me.

“But you know that already, don’t you, Preacher?” Glenn tilted his head forward and grinned like a jack-o’-lantern. “You’ve touched our tender flower, haven’t you? Hmm? Felt her bruises?”

“No,” Jan said hoarsely.

Glenn stepped forward and swung his arm in a wide arc. His hand crashed against Jan’s head like a club. If he hadn’t already been sitting, the blow would have taken him from his feet. As it was, it nearly broke his neck. A white ball of pain swallowed him and sent him over a cliff of blackness.

HE DIDN’T even know he’d passed out until he struggled back into consciousness. It must’ve been some time, because Glenn was leaning over the bar with a drink in one hand. His belly hung low, bared like an albino watermelon beneath his Hawaiian shirt hitched up by the bar. He looked back, saw that Jan had stirred, pushed himself off and strode across the floor

“Back again? Thoughtful of you.”

Hands jerked Jan to a seated position. He let his head slip and closed his eyes. A finger rested under his nose and pushed it back. “You look at me when I’m talking to you.” Lutz stepped back and Jan steadied his head.

“That’s better. Now we’re going to do this once, Preacher. Only once. Because you know I don’t have all day, right? You do know that I’m Satan, don’t you? To you I’m Satan. I would just as soon cut your tongue off as listen to you talk. But you caught me on a good day. I have my precious flower back, and that makes me feel generous, so we’re going to do it differently. But we’re only going to do it once; I want you to be very clear about that. Are you understanding this?”

Jan’s head slowly cleared. He gave the man a shallow nod.

“Speak to me when I ask you a question, Preacher.”

“Yeth,” Jan said around a swollen tongue. That last blow had done some damage to his mouth.

“Okay.” He turned and nodded to the man sitting in the folding chair by the bar. “Bring her.”

The man walked to a door and knocked. Two came from the other room; another thug first, and then a woman.

Helen.

It was an odd moment. Jan wasn’t even fully conscious; he was still in a fog; his life hung over a cliff, suspended by a thin thread it seemed. And all of this
because
of Helen.

Yet when his eyes focused and he became certain that it was her, everything else became useless information. Because she was here and he was here, and he was watching her wide blue eyes emerge from the shadows, flowers of delicate beauty. His pulse surged and his knees suddenly felt weak. He wanted to beg for her forgiveness and that terrified him. She should be begging for
his
forgiveness. And how could his knees feel weak at the sight of her? They’d been cut from under him already.

His body was too weak to show any of this—too weak to move. He sat like a side of beef against the wall, unmoving, but his heart began to do backflips when Helen looked at him.

“Thank you, my dear, for joining us,” Glenn said. “Come, stand in front of him.”

She walked to a point five feet from Jan, all the while looking at him with those fawn eyes.
Listen to me, Helen. Listen to me, it’s all right. I love you, my dear
.
I love you madly
. His mind spoke it, but he knew she couldn’t possibly gather any such thing from his sagging face.

“Stand him up!” Glenn said.

The two men walked over, each took an arm, and they hoisted Jan to his feet. His head throbbed and he could not support his own weight. They held him under the arms.

“Now we have the two lovers together.” Glenn stood to one side, like a minister wedding a bride and groom. “It is a lovely sight, isn’t it? What do you make of him, my dear?” This to Helen.

She stood frozen with her mouth slightly agape. Perhaps he’d doped her. Or perhaps she’d doped herself.

“Helen?” Glenn said.

“Yes?” she responded, breathy and quiet.

“I asked you what you thought of him.”

“He looks hurt.”

Glenn chuckled. “Good. That’s good. Doesn’t it make you want to spit on him?”

She didn’t respond.

“Helen, remember our little chat earlier? Hmm? Do you remember that, honey?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, I know that it may not feel natural at first, but it will later. So I want you to do what we talked about. Okay?”

The room seemed vacated of air. Nobody moved. Jan hung limp. Helen looked as if she were in another world altogether. A moment of reckoning. But Jan didn’t know what was being reckoned.

Glenn spoke very softly now. “Helen.”

Nothing.

“Helen, if you don’t do what we talked about I’ll break some of your bones. Do you hear me, princess?”

Helen hesitated and then took a step forward. She swallowed hard and closed her eyes. The sound of her shallow breaths worked like billows in the room. But she made no other move.

Glenn’s threat came very quietly. “Helen, I swear I will break some bones, dear.”

Her nostrils flared and she pursed her lips. Then she leaned forward and spit into Jan’s face.

Jan blinked, shocked, staring at her wounded expression, hardly aware of the spittle on his cheek.

“Good,” Glenn cooed. “Good. Now hit him, Helen. Hit him and tell him that he makes you sick.”

Helen shifted on her feet, and Jan saw the terror in her eyes. She stood still.

Glenn took one long stride toward Jan and swung his fist like a mallet from his hip. “Hit him!” he screamed. The knuckles struck the left side of Jan’s chest and a pain stabbed through his heart. The room swam, and for a moment Jan thought he might pass out again.

Glenn stepped back and looked at Helen. Sweat glistened on his face. He smiled. “You hit him or I hit you. That’s the game, Helen.”

It struck Jan then that Glenn meant to ruin him. This was all about Helen, not him. He was only the prop. Jan felt the first real shafts of fear run through his mind.

Don’t do it, Helen! Don’t do it! This is madness!

This couldn’t be happening. At any moment the police would crash through the door with drawn weapons. He was a well-known man. He was on the verge of becoming a household name, and here he was in some absurd lovers’ quarrel between two twisted souls. He had no business being here!

Karen’s face flashed through his mind.
Dear, God! What have I done?

Helen’s body began to tremble—Jan saw it and he wondered if Glenn saw it. She looked small and puny standing next to him. Ugly. Jan blinked
.

She’s my enemy
, he thought. A small wave of revulsion swept through Jan’s gut. He felt inhuman in that moment. Like a pile of waste stepped on by a passing parade. Not the celebrity writer at all.

Oh Karen, dear Karen, what have I done?

Helen’s face began to wrinkle. Tears ran down her cheek. Her hands began to quake badly, and Jan thought she was building her rage. But Glenn’s face was suddenly white; he’d seen something else in her.

“You do it, you pig!” he growled. “You do it or I’ll pound you to a pulp, you hear me?”

Her mouth suddenly cracked to a frown and a high, squeaking sound escaped her throat. Her eyes closed and her hand balled into a fist. Her cry wasn’t a wail of rage. It was a cry of anguish. She was being torn to shreds.

Helen suddenly moaned loudly and she swung her hand in a wide arc.

The blow may have landed, Jan didn’t know, because in that moment the nightclub vanished.

With a brilliant flash of light, it was gone.

He wasn’t in the colored light, propped up like a side of beef. He was standing on the edge of an endless flowered field. The same white desert he’d seen once before, when he’d first touched Helen.

And then suddenly he knew that he’d seen this scene more than just once. He’d seen it a thousand times! This was the scene from his dreams! The white field that flashed into his dreams! How had he not recognized it?

It lay absolutely still.

Still except for the weeping.

He noticed her then. There was more than the field of flowers before him: There was a figure wearing a pink dress, lying on the petals not fifteen feet from him, looking at him. It was Helen.

Helen!

Only Helen hardly looked like Helen because her face was as white as cotton and her eyes were gray. She looked as though she’d been in a grave for a while before they’d dug her out and placed her here, on the bed of strange flowers.

Her chest rose and fell slowly, and she stared at him. But if she recognized him her blank look did not show it.

The weeping was for her.

He knew that because it came sweeping out of the sky on the lips of invisible mourners. Like a Requiem Mass for the dead. Such sadness, such anguish over Helen.

Still she gazed at him with flat, pale lips and dead eyes, breathing slowly while the sky filled with a million baying voices. Then the voices suddenly descended upon him, drowning him in their sorrow.

He was weeping immediately. Without warning. The pressure of grief fell so strongly on his chest that he couldn’t breathe. He could only expel his breath in a long moan. He began to panic under the pain. He was dying! This was surely death flowing through his veins. He fell forward, unable to stand.

Jan collapsed among the white petals, prone at her feet. At Helen’s feet. He gasped and rolled onto his back. The sky sustained a long howl; the mourners’ undying grief. And Jan wept bitterly with them. He held himself tight to keep from falling apart and he wept.

Jan’s eyes were closed when the sky went black and silent. Only his own weeping sounded. His eyes snapped open. He was back in the nightclub, hanging limp between the two men and blubbering like a baby.

Glenn was yelling. “. . . you hear me, you piece of trash!” He was towering over Helen, who had fallen to her knees, cowering and sobbing. “You make me sick!” Glenn spat at her. “Sick!”

Jan strained against the hands that held him, but succeeded only in inviting a new surge of pain through his head.
Helen, dear Helen!
His face twisted in empathy
. Oh, God, please save her! I love her.

Tell her that, Jan. Tell her!

She sagged on the floor, heaving with sobs, her face white and her lips peeled back in desperation. Jan spoke to her. “Helen.” It came out more like a moan, but he didn’t care now. “Helen, I love you.”

She heard and opened her eyes. They were blue. Deep blue. Swimming in tears and red around the edges and stricken with grief, but blue.

“Helen.” They were both crying hard then. Looking at each other with twisted faces and weeping without words.

Glenn took a step back and glanced between them. For a moment his eyes widened. Then his face flashed red and screwed to a knot. He leaped forward and swung his foot like a place-kicker. The black boot struck Jan in his ribs. Something snapped and Jan’s world began to fade.

Helen had stretched her arms out to him; her fingers spread and taut, like desperate claws. Glenn whirled and swung his foot at her. The blow knocked her to her side and she quieted to a quivering lump, but her eyes did not leave Jan’s.

The brutes dropped him and he collapsed onto his face. Another blow landed on his back. And another.

He lost consciousness then, thinking the world was ending.

THEY LEFT Jan tied in the corner for another day, alone and without water. During that time he saw no one. He drifted in and out, through fields of white flowers and chambers that echoed with the sound of weeping. Heaven was weeping. Heaven was weeping for Helen.