As he fed, stirring the scalp, his face aglow from the embers of the fire, he shed a tear for Ian and for himself. Existence after this, if he could not become one with the beings that had nurtured him all these years, was hardly worth anything. He determined that if Ian's scalp, applied to his own, did not fulfill the bargain of the dark beings, then he might himself take a final life—his own.
But time was needed ... time to allow the processes to take place, to test the possibilities. That time might only be found if Grant and Corman were dead and put away. He looked for the best spot from which to spring out at Grant when he entered.
SEVENTEEN
Weaving dangerously, Dean took the turn onto the dirt road called Hardscrabble too late, and the ambulance tore onto the soft shoulder out of control and sideswiped a tree before coming to a halt. Dean got out, shaken and reaching for his .38 only to find it gone. He'd lost it somewhere between the hospital and here, he thought, before proceeding on foot toward the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. He had already called for backup, using the ambulance radio, explaining as best he could why he'd stolen the unit.
He saw carnage ahead of him, two bodies lying inert outside Peggy Carson's squad car, and soon he knew the two uniformed men were Staubb and Williams. He lifted Staubb's gun, which was a few feet away in the sandy soil, preferring it to wrenching Williams’ from its holster. Dean then checked the clip and found it all right, a single shot having been fired. Both men had been quietly dispatched with knives, telling Dean his hunch had been right, that the killers had returned here.
Dean neared the house at a crouch, fearing he'd find Sid Corman dead, propped up with a gun in his hand, or strung up, leaving a suicide note of confession forced from him. Dean feared he would be too late, much too late.
Dean leapt to the porch to avoid the squeaking stairs, but the porch sagged with a groan beneath his feet. If Hamel and that bastard brother of his were inside, they knew he was outside now.
The door rattled against his attempt to open it. It was secured tight. There would be no quiet entry, Dean told himself, no way. Still, he must try the rear, and so he cautiously made his way toward the back. There he stared through a window at a man's form lying in the dark interior, Sid's he guessed, and something snapped inside him.
He broke the glass on the door and let himself in, rushing to Sid where he lay alongside the oven. Lifting Sid's head he saw a horrible gash where his forehead ought to be. Dean swallowed a scream, until his eyes, adjusting to the light, saw that it was Hamel! Hamel without a scalp! Benjamin I. Hamel, scalped and murdered in his home on Hardscrabble Road in Wekiva by ... by whom?
"Sid?” Dean called out, going further into the house, toward the bedroom and the false closet and wall where the dwarf lived and fed himself, where Sid must now be....
"Sid? Sid, can you answer me?"
Dean saw there was a candle burning on the table, the only light in the odorous room, save for the glow of the dying embers at the fireplace where that black witches’ cauldron still bubbled and gurgled. Stepping closer, inching nearer, Dean saw Sid's feet and legs, then his chest. He was bound and gagged, his features in a shadowed corner next to the fireplace.
"Sid!” Dean rushed in to help his friend, snatching at the rope binding his feet, which was not rope at all but gut, human gut, dried and cured and turned into rope as strong as hemp. Dean grabbed for a scalpel he kept in an inside pocket to cut away at the stuff. While doing so, he cringed at the realization of what it was he held in his hands. Slicing through the tough, dried string, he freed Sid's legs and then, seeing terror in Sid's eyes, snatched away the suffocating gag in Sid's mouth. The instant he did so, Sid shouted, “Behind you!"
But the warning came too late. At the same instant Dean felt the catapulting stool hitting him in the back of the head, stunning him. He staggered a moment, dazed, when something else slammed into his back and shoulders. It was the dwarf, straddling him, a knife slicing away at his head and shoulders. A tear to his breast bone, a swish by his eye, and then the blade came down, a curled scimitar driving into his shoulder. Dean threw himself down, rolling over with all his weight, the sound of Staubb's .38 sliding from his belt to some dark corner of the room. Another sound, an animal sound of pain, had commingled with Dean's own screams that echoed Sid's.
"Where is he? Where the hell is he?” Dean shouted.
"I'm not sure. Get me loose,” cried Sid.
But the dwarf rocketed himself at Dean's back a second time, coming out of the dark. Again the knife slammed into Dean, and this time the cut was deep and painful, slicing his left arm at the bicep, blood pumping out onto Sid as Dean fought in the small space with the madman, trying desperately to cut him with the scalpel.
But the dwarf leapt away again and once more the room was still, silent, the deadly thing somewhere nearby, accustomed to seeing through the shroud of darkness. He knew where Dean was, but Dean could not see him.
"My hands, Dean, so I can help you! My hands!"
But the wound to Dean's arm and the blow to his head had effectively stunned him. He did a stumbling dance toward Sid, seeing him through the haze, hearing his plea only half-real, when suddenly the evil weight was on his back again.
With a revulsion and hatred Dean had never felt before, he reached round with bloodied hands and got firm hold of the thing by its arm and shoulder and flung it with all his might into the hearth, where for an instant Dean's eyes focused on the hairy beast with the enormous red-embered eyes, its nostrils flaring, the huge, curved knife looking like its horn.
"Dean!” shouted Sid. The knife-wielding dwarf slashed first his right, then his left leg, skittered past him, and disappeared yet again.
"Under the corner table—no, the other corner!” Sid shouted. “The gun, get the gun!"
Dean, the pain of his arm intense, reached under the table. His hand felt metal and he wrapped it round the gun and snatched it out only an instant before the sound of the scimitar told him he could have lost the hand.
Backing off from the dark corner, Dean tried desperately to see the evil hiding there, to blow it to pieces.
"God damn it, Dean, get me loose,” Sid cried behind him.
Dean backed cautiously to where Sid remained propped near the fireplace, stumbling over Sid and reaching round to undo the hands, when Sid shouted another warning. Again the devilish dwarf was on Dean, who rose to his feet, trying to dislodge the thing from his back, holding firmly to the gun, using it as a pummel against his attacker.
With a wild, wheeling twist and push, Dean sent himself and his attacker hard against the far wall, knocking the air out of the dwarf and flipping him forward. The creature's small body skittered once more into shadow, a squeal of pain pealing from him. Dean didn't dare look away from the place where the thing had pulled itself. He leveled the gun, preparing to fire, when he realized the dwarf was on a shelf at eye-level, and not on the floor, and that he was coming through the air at him for a final blow, the knife coming right at Dean's eyes, when Dean ducked.
The dwarf's miss hurled him hard against the hearth a second time. This time Dean was ready for the bastard, for at the very moment Dean ducked, he also wheeled and brought up the .38, trained it on the dwarf, and sent the hammer back.
But Dean stopped cold to stare at the pleading eyes inside the ugly, deformed head, deep beneath folds of skin and hair. They were Hamel's eyes!
This must be Hamel's supposed dead twin brother, after all.
Dean stared for a moment, mesmerized by the man's eyes, as the dwarf lifted the knife, preparing to throw it.