“I am Margaret Morgan, child. I glimpse you through the ages, for such is the power of my Dark Lord. You have done nothing, and yet you shall suffer. And yet you, too, are chosen.”
Heidi looked past the woman, at her own door. She tried to hear the sound of Steve scratching there, but the hall still seemed absent of all sound apart from Morgan’s soft, oddly soothing voice.
“Feel the earth… taste of the air. Hear that?” asked Morgan. She cupped her hand to her ear. Heidi listened, but still heard nothing beyond Morgan’s voice. “The sound of the clouds and the scent of the wind… all becoming one. The whores of the deceivers will gather before us and bleed us a King. You, my beloved sister, are the knife by which we strip the skin of Salem’s daughters.”
As she spoke, smoke began to rise around her. Then flames. Then, though her voice remained soft and did not change at all, she began to burn. Her skin reddened and then began to boil and crackle, then blacken.
“All will know the sister’s pain…,” she said to Heidi. Slowly, her voice became more broken, more labored, and she began to hesitate between the words, her eyes filling with anguish. “My pain… the pain of feeling flesh cooking within your body… They will feel what I felt… They will…”
But Margaret Morgan couldn’t go on. Her hair caught fire, and her face as well. She seemed to want to speak again, seemed to be struggling to say more. But when she managed to open her mouth again, her head engulfed in flames, it was only to let out a terrible scream.
Chapter Twenty-one
She sat straight up, gasping for breath. Where was she? In the hallway, watching that woman catch flame? No, she was in her bedroom, in bed, the TV still on, the Mafia hit man on the screen. She must have dozed off and then stumbled into some sort of bad dream.
But she could still see, in one corner of her mind, the red light illuminating the room, could still almost smell the burning flesh in her nostrils. That was fucked-up, a woman going up in flames like that, so suddenly. On the one hand, she could recognize that it must have been a dream, that it hadn’t happened. On the other hand, though, it still felt so real that it was hard to believe it hadn’t happened.
She sat there for a moment, her heart beating hard, and then she groped around until she found the lamp on the bedside table. She clicked it on. She kicked back the covers and examined her arms and legs, looking for marks from the attack, but there was nothing there. Of course there’s nothing, she told herself again. It was only a dream. But still she kept touching her body, looking for marks or cuts. She could feel them there, gashes and abrasions on her skin, even though they weren’t visible. Like they were there psychically even if physically there was nothing.
She shook her head. What was wrong with her? Was she going to start having bad dreams now? Wasn’t her life tough enough as it was? What had happened to the old days when she hadn’t had to worry about anything, back before her life got complicated?
Her mind wandered a little, her eyes returning to the screen.
“What did you want them to think as they died?” asked the interviewer from off-camera.
“Nothing,” said the hit man, whose face was covered by a sack. “I just wanted them to see my face. I wanted them to realize I was Death.”
Fuck, she said. No wonder I’m having bad dreams.
And then suddenly she saw it, two eyes glowing in the darkness below her. She almost screamed before she realized it was just Steve.
“You scared me, buddy,” she said, her heart thumping again. “And just when I was starting to calm down. Go lay down.” But then, before he could, she reached out to pet him. He pressed up against the side of the bed and bent his head to get it at the angle he wanted scratched, just like he always did. It made her feel a little better, having him there with her. And he was calm, too, which was a good sign.
She clicked the TV off and lay back in bed, one hand still idly trailing along her dog’s back.
How was she supposed to read it, this dream? She still felt like there should be marks on her body, cuts and scratches and even gashes. But there was nothing. She took a deep breath, trying to calm down. And what had been up with apartment number five in her dream? What had been in there? What was it exactly that had attacked her? Something not human, though it had been human once. Or no, there were two of them; maybe they weren’t the same thing. Undead or ghouls or God knows what.
But what was she talking about? They weren’t real, after all. It was a dream. There was no point trying to think about them as if they were real. She could see how it might happen. Those two black-metal ghouls in the studio earlier in the day didn’t help any, obviously. They’d gotten deeper into her head than she’d realized. Plus, that video of theirs, the “darkness and silence of the abyss,” or whatever they’d called it, that was odd stuff, probably chock-full of subliminal bullshit that was just waiting for her to fall asleep so that it could surface. That must be the explanation. She hadn’t ever had a dream like that before. And she hoped she never would again.
She felt a little cold. She realized the bedroom window was open, a light breeze ruffling the curtain. Had she left it open? She couldn’t remember having done so, and it was hardly the right time of year for it, considering how cold she was, but who knows. She’d been drinking. Maybe she’d been flushed when she went to bed. She sighed and stood up to go shut it.
As she was about to slide it closed, she noticed across the street a fat man standing just inside his own window, facing slightly to the side, messing with something just out of sight. He was naked, his belly and thighs spilling out to hide his privates. Somehow that looked more obscene to her than if his cock had been visible. There was something wrong with him: he had a clear plastic mask strapped over his face. She followed the tube leading off it back to an oxygen tank. Ugh, she thought. And then he turned toward the window and looked straight at her. Caught off guard, she met his gaze. For a moment they just stared at one another, and then he lifted up a hand that seemed strangely red, as if stained with blood, and slammed a set of iron shutters closed.
Excuse you, she thought. Didn’t hurt to look, did it? Or maybe it did a little, if that guy was what you had to look at.
She was starting to feel a little better. She went back to the bed and crawled onto it, lying facedown. Turning out the light and closing her eyes, she tried to get back to sleep.
When the light was on, when she had walked through the room, when she had looked around, it simply wasn’t there. Or if it was there, she somehow couldn’t see it. Somehow looked right through it. Would someone else coming into the room have seen it, or when the light was on was it simply not there?
But there in the dark above her something slowly coalesced. At first it was little more than an unsteadiness in the air; then it became a blur, then, slowly, more and more substantial. It took on form. A line of deeper darkness running down from the ceiling became, slowly, the links of a greased iron chain. At the end of it hung something that at first seemed solid but then separated into gaps and bars, becoming a wrought-iron cage. It was empty, but the bars were stained with blood and stuck with feathers and the door did not latch. It swung slowly back and forth, creaking. But rather than slowing and stopping, it swung more and more regularly. It seemed propelled by an unseen hand, the hand soothing and coaxing some unseen or invisible thing in the cage.