Then she heard the screams.
God Almighty…
They were human screams, she realized. They were—
The elevator doors thunked open.
—Paul’s screams…
It was as if she suddenly had fallen into a trance. Vera backed away from the elevator; the doors reclosed without her. She turned and, almost calmly, went back into the kitchen.
She stood a moment, looking around amid the harsh overhead light. There it is, she thought, and then she leaned over to—
Paul’s horror locked him down in rigor. The thing that Magwyth had turned into seemed to unhinge its jaw. Breath like corpse-pit gas gusted from the stretched maw lined with rows of needle teeth. A slick, sinewy hand clamped his throat, as the maw stretched open further to admit the entirety of Paul’s face…
—pick up the big revolver Feldspar had killed Kyle with. The old gun felt heavy as a brick in Vera’s hand, and it was still warm. From outside, Paul’s screams rose to a fever-pitch.
Vera hefted the revolver. Then she—
Its eyes had transformed into huge spherical nuggets the color of sick urine. Its nostrils were but rimmed pits. And as the abysmal maw descended, eddying chuckles, Paul could see the nublike horns protruding from the twisted, grayish forehead…
—sprinted through the restaurant, crossed the atrium, and strode to the foyer. She gazed out onto the front stoop before the floodlit courtyard. Saw the big amethyst crushed to dust. And saw—
I’m dead, Paul thought stoically. If the taloned hand’s grip on his throat didn’t kill him, certainly the jagged maw’s saw-rows of teeth would. It’s going to bite my face off. But first, and worse, was the thing’s tongue, which then reeled from the trapdoor mouth. Not a tongue but a cluster of fleshy, wet tendrils, akin to tentacles, each blood-red tip moving independently to lick his face, squirm under his lips, and shudder down his throat…
—not Feldspar but some demented thing straddling Paul. It’s going to kill him, she thought very methodically, and then me.
Unless—
Then the tongues rejoined, a mass of convulsing flesh, and shot fully down his throat. They were so long…Paul could feel them writhing now in the pit of his stomach…
—what she’d read in the book was all true. They were immortal, they could not be killed unless the energy of their protection—the amethyst—was diffused. Kyle had died at the hands of Feldspar, but only after his pendant had been stripped of him. But did the same vulnerability apply to Feldspar himself?
She raised the gun.
“Paul!” she shouted—
“Paul!” came the shout. The thing’s spread mouth backed away just as it was about to close to slough all the flesh off Paul’s face, much like eating the icing off the top of a cupcake. The taloned hand lifted off his throat, and the primeval face then turned to look back at the source of the shout…
—and then nearly fainted at the sight of the face which turned to look at her…
The face of Magwyth…
The angled, pointed cheekbones, the huge yellow eyes, and the sprout of tentacles roving enfrenzied from the slitlike lips.
The face in her dreams…
Vera squeezed her eyes shut as she squeezed the revolver’s cold, clunky trigger— Ba-BAM!
Paul’s eyes locked open. A mammoth sound cracked in his ears, then a CRACK!, then a titanic wet SPLAT! The thing’s warped head exploded.
The heavy pistol fell from Vera’s hand. Hot and sooty smoke stung her eyes. Her ears rang.
A plume of vomit-colored slush vaulted out of the thing’s head. Some of the pulp shot so far it landed in the heated fountain in the center of the cul-de-sac.
The figure shuddered…
Then it fell over limp to Paul’s side.
And dissolved to nothingness.
— | — | —
EPILOGUE
Her head lay in his lap as he drove.
The Lamborghini’s gears screamed, its engine revving at alternate pitches. The tires hypnotically hummed.
As the sleek car sucked down into each drastic veer and turn, she could feel her innards shift against the inertia.
Neither of them would speak for days, and why should they? What good were words? What on earth could they say?
A gibbous moon broke through the low clouds. Its yellow face followed them out and away…
As he drove, Paul slipped his right hand between her breasts, to feel her there, to feel her heart beating.
— | — | —
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Lee is the author of almost fifty novels and numerous short stories and novellas (or is it novellae? Hmm.) Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while HEADER was released on DVD in 2009; also, he has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, and Haunter of the Threshold. One of Lee’s creative ambitions is to one day write an effective M.R. James pastiche.
www.edwardleeonline.com