Stu’s head was swimming. He felt like he was in a dream. He knew now Lorelei meant to harm him. Probably kill him. And as bad as that was-he definitely didn’t want to die-the inability to understand what was going on here was even worse. He wanted to know why this was happening. Maybe she had lost her mind at some point during their years apart. That must be it. It was the only thing that could explain the nonsense talk about “sacrifice” and “honoring the goddess.” And as he considered the likelihood of Lorelei’s madness, the terror that had taken root within grew exponentially. His heart slammed in his chest and his eyes filled with tears. He had so much left he wanted to do in life.
It couldn’t end like this. So soon and unexpectedly.
It wasn’t fair.
Lorelei knelt and lifted a black plastic garbage bag off the floor. She flashed a smile disturbing in its gleefulness and dumped the bag’s contents on the bed next to him. Stu lifted his head and saw a funnel affixed to a length of vacuum hose, a roll of duct tape, a knife, and a bottle of extra-strength Drano.
He let out a whimper and showed Lorelei a beseeching look. “No…nonono…you can’t.”
Lorelei laughed. “Oh, but I can.”
Tears spilled in hot streams down Stu’s face. “No. Jesus…no…”
Lorelei’s eyes turned hard. “It’s Lamia you should be praying to, Stu.”
She picked up the length of vacuum hose and shoved it through his wide-open mouth, killing a burgeoning sob. Stu’s eyes went wide and he tried to push the hose out of his mouth with his tongue. But Lorelei climbed atop him and planted a knee on his chest, then used her leverage to shove the hose deeper down his throat. He gagged and coughed, and the rapid slamming of his heart sounded like thunder in his ears. Through it all, Lorelei laughed.
She wrapped several layers of duct tape around his head to better secure the hose.
Then she used the knife to cut him.
The cutting went on for a seeming eternity. Lorelei licked his wounds and painted her body with his blood.
The pain was immense. Staggering. All of existence was pain, it seemed. And yet, it afforded him a small mea sure of peace, because he knew it couldn’t get any worse than this.
But he was wrong.
Lorelei picked up the Drano and slowly twisted the cap off the bottle, savoring the agony and helplessness in his expression.
She smiled. “Bottoms up, baby.”
She picked up the funnel and began to pour.
And for Stu, things got a lot worse for a little while.
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
There was something strange about the rat in the corner of Jolene McAllister’s jail cell. Her cell was one of eight at the Rockville police station, and to night she was the township’s lone prisoner. She’d been grateful for the solitude in the beginning. She wanted to be away from people, away from the reality of the royal mess she’d made of her life. Here in this cell, removed from the detectives and their endless questions, she’d experienced a strange kind of peace. She could close her eyes and pretend she was in her own bed in her own home. The cot in her cell was a good deal less comfortable than her own bed, so it took a bit of imagination.
But she managed.
And she even succeeded in slipping into a blissful, dreamless sleep for a time. Until she heard the chittering of the rodent. The sound drew her back to grim reality. She heard the rodent scuttling across the floor of the cell, and the fleeting sense of peace she’d known deserted her. She was in jail. She was alone. And there was nothing at all she could do about it. She was going to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Never again would she see Trey, her best-loved son. The long-dreamed-of pilgrimage to Memphis, the city where she was born, would never occur. Her days of determining the course of her own life had come to an abrupt, irrevocable halt. The stark prospect sent her tumbling into depression, and she began to imagine ways she might kill herself.
Then her gaze went to the corner and she saw the rat for the first time.
Shit.
That’s no motherfucking rat.
Jolene’s mind whirled and her vision went blurry for a moment. The thing in the corner was an impossibility. So this could only be a dream. Except that the uncomfortably thin mattress upon which she lay felt exceedingly real. She could feel every ache in her old and creaky joints.
Her vision cleared and she risked a peek at the corner again.
Still there.
Fuck.
There were a lot of things wrong here. Scratch that. A lot of things weird here. And not just the central mind-fuck threatening to explode what remained of her sanity. For one thing, she shouldn’t have been able to see the thing in the corner at all. The corridor lights were off, rendering her cell and the others as dark as the inside of a coffin. Yet she could see the thing. Its eyes glowed like tiny specks of yellow neon, and the dim light allowed her to see the hazy outline of its little body.
Jolene whimpered. “Go away! You’re not real!”
The creature waddled closer and now she could no longer deny the reality of what she was seeing. Nor could she pretend her mind was playing tricks on her. The thing was definitely not a rat. And the sounds emanating from its tiny mouth weren’t rodent sounds. The thing on the floor was her husband, somehow reduced to rat size. He was trying to talk to her, but he was too small for his words to be intelligible from this distance. Jolene would have to get down on the floor, put her ear down close to his shrunken body, to hear what he wanted to tell her-but she had no intention of doing that.
Her mind again rebelled against the idea that Tiny Hal was real. Jolene was a junior high dropout, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She thought she had a pretty firm handle on what things were possible in the real world. What she was seeing now just wasn’t possible.
And yet…
The thing that could not be continued to stumble toward her cot. As it drew closer, Jolene was able to make out finer details, including evidence of her own handiwork, the ragged stumps where she’d cut off his fingers and cauterized the open wounds with an acetylene torch. And she could see the terror in his eyes. He was gesturing wildly and opening his mouth wide to scream at her.
Jolene closed her eyes. “This is a dream. A nightmare. I’m going to wake up now.”
Just because this felt real didn’t mean it was. She’d had dreams like that before. Some far worse than this. Real doozies, like the recurring one in which a masked serial killer chased her endlessly through a dark forest. The killer would inevitably close the gap between them, getting close enough to reach out to her with a gloved hand-and then she’d wake up with a gasp, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. The serial killer dream always seemed so real-the danger, the rough forest floor beneath her bare feet-and so it seemed safe to dismiss this episode as mental silliness, a case of her mind weaving her tragedy into a kind of dark farce. Very vivid and compelling, but a farce nonetheless.
Jolene began to drift toward unconsciousness. She spoke again, a groggy but defiant jab at the darkness: “People don’t shrink. I’m not crazy.”
A sound close to her ear snapped her awake.
She glanced down and saw her diminutive husband attempting to climb up one of the cot’s metal legs. Jolene’s eyes went wide and she let out a yelp. Hal cringed. Her shrill shriek seemed to overwhelm his little ears, probably sounding to him like feedback from a wall of amplifiers at a rock concert.
Jolene acted without thinking.
She snatched Hal off the cot leg, sat up, and swung her legs over the edge of the cot. Hal struggled in her grip and almost got loose, but Jolene tightened her fingers around him. Maybe a bit more tightly than was necessary. Hal’s face turned red. He struggled to draw in breath. Jolene eased the pressure slightly. Hal immediately began trying to speak to her again, but she still couldn’t make out what he was saying.