Gothic, page 21
Instead, it is the visage of a grinning Tyson spread across the canvas of sky, his eyes hidden by opaque blue lenses, sliding the drawer slowly closed… before killing the music.
Forty-four
As Sarah dies…
On the kitchen floor, staring sideways at the legs of the kitchen table. She watches the blood from the wound in her head pool into her vision, a growing red lake breaking through the dam of her skull, spreading across a landscape of white tiles…
****
This time, Sarah doesn’t knock when she opens the office door. She’s tired of these insane writing sessions that last entire days, often into nights—without pause, without break.
It’s unhealthy, she reasons, and therefore blames her intrusion on her deep concern for Tyson (not her curiosity) as she pushes the door silently open, pokes her head inside.
She looks toward the desk… and clamps a hand over her mouth.
To stifle the scream.
Tyson’s writing, but he isn’t looking at the computer. He’s staring straight upward, as if studying a cobweb arched across a far corner of the room, while his fingers move frenetically across the keyboard, pounding the keys with such force and speed it sounds like a stampede of plastic horses.
What truly frightens her, however, is his face—slack and deeply-lined as a walnut, as if he’d aged twenty years since breakfast, and a slick of drool stems from the corner of his mouth.
But his eyes are the real horror show.
Bulging and white as cue balls, streaked with red veins and smeared spots of dirty gray, blind and unnaturally wide, as if he’s watching something that fills him with terror, something unspeakable.
Something only a blind man can see.
He mumbles to himself, as if dictating to the flying, obedient fingers. She hears strange phrases, strings of words that don’t seem to be associated with the rapid movements of his hands. Part of some other book, perhaps. A different story he’s hoping to tell.
“Ty?”
She takes another step closer, shivering with cold. She looks down at herself and realizes, with more curiosity than alarm, that she’s completely nude.
Now how did that happen? she wonders, but then thinks no more of it. For some reason, it seems perfectly natural.
“Come inside, come inside,” he says, never shifting those horrible eyes from the ceiling. “We see you.”
The typing stops, and along with it the mad clatter of the keys.
The room is deathly quiet.
Tyson turns his head away from the corner and looks directly at her, scrutinizes her with those dreadful blank eyes, that trenched face. Three long lines run dark red along one withered cheek, bleeding as if freshly cut.
He smiles at her, a smile so broad that it makes the sides of his face stretch like rubber.
Like a mask, she thinks wildly. He’s just wearing a mask. Of course!
But it isn’t a mask, and she knows that, too.
And when he stands and walks toward her, she knows the truth of things: that it was him. Yes, it’s Tyson, but it’s also him.
The other one.
She stands frozen, unable to move as he comes toward her in fast, shuffling steps, that awful smile never lessening, those dingy cue ball eyes never wavering.
He clutches her arms in a fierce grip, leans down to put his wet mouth by her ear.
“We’ve been waiting for you.”
He moves behind her and pushes her toward the desk. Gently at first but then, when she begins to resist, with more force.
She digs in her heels and yells for him to “Stop, please STOP!” because now the desk is not a desk at all, but a massive, monstrous mouth.
It splits open horizontally, a ghostly, blue-lit gap shines brightly across its middle. Wooden teeth, sharp as vampire stakes, ridge the top and bottom of the expanding breach, ready to chomp her up, chew her flesh and hair and bones and swallow it all down.
Eager to devour. She can sense its desire. Its hunger.
The stone top—the altar where the sacrifices are laid, she knows, feeling suddenly light-headed, feeling very strange indeed—boils like black soup left too long on the burner. The laptop and other accessories are gone, swept away.
The desktop has been cleared, just for her.
Tyson—or the thing that he has become—spins her around to face him and she screams as he opens his mouth and shows her the black gummy works within, tongue lolling over gray, chipped teeth, wild egg-white eyes rolling in his skull. She thinks he’s going to push her into that blue mouth but instead he tightens his grip and lifts her high in the air, then slams her body down onto the amorphous desktop. The bubbling, gurgling surface sticks to her like thick glue, adheres to her skin with such strength that she knows if she tries to tug her arms or legs free it will rip away her flesh like an orange peel.
Tyson places a hand between her breasts and the other on her abdomen. He begins to push her down.
Sarah feels herself being slowly submerged into a hellish quagmire—a feeling more terrible than sinking into hot sewage or boiling tar, into a lake of fire. It disgusts her. It shames her. It’s as if she is being baptized in the river Styx by the Ferryman, blind eyes replacing his hollow furnaces of fire, and she cries out for mercy.
As he continues to push her deeper, deeper, she becomes more enveloped, her body tingling as it sinks, her lungs squeezing, collapsing. Her stomach revolts, nausea rising into her throat. She struggles, gags, and curses; her terror combines with a violent survival instinct, demanding she get FREE, but the desk holds her fast. She can’t move her arms, legs, feet, head.
Suddenly, the heat of the fluid around her body becomes icy cold—so cold oh my god save me anything but this—a frigid sea that seeps higher, swallowing her whole.
“Aaaahhh,” Tyson says, an audible sigh of near sexual pleasure.
“No no no.” She weeps denials of her fate as tears run from her eyes. “I don’t want to die, please… not yet. I don’t want to die… Tyson please… I love you.”
For a brief moment, Tyson’s rapturous expression relaxes, his smile smears into a frown like wet paint, but the firmness of his hands pressing down does not falter.
She thinks, before the end, he may have mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
The icy black fluid blankets her legs, slides over her waist like a cold wet arm pulling her down from behind. Her ears are covered and the world falls mute. Liquid climbs past her temples, dips into the carved ravines that lead to her eyeballs… and pool inward.
She opens her mouth to scream one last time into the face of that smiling, dead-eyed visage of the man she once loved more than anything in the world. Flashes of her life—a child, a teenager in love, her parents, Violet as an adult, visiting her in old age, her husband holding her close—erupt in her brain, images of a life lived, of the life she will never live.
His blind eyes are the last thing she sees as darkness spills over her face, covers her eyes, her nose; slides into her gaping mouth and down her throat, filling her.
Then there is nothing.
Nothing but the corrupt, blessed dark.
Forty-five
As Violet (almost) dies…
OH MY GOD! FUCK FUCK FUCK!
“Violet, RUN!”
But Violet stands rigid, motionless, staring at the body of the woman she thought of as her mother; the woman who helped raise her, who loved her as her own flesh-and-blood for the last decade of her life.
Sarah lies on the kitchen floor, knocked off the chair by the force of the bullet that slammed into the back of her head and split it wide. A pool of blood pours from the wound and spreads out in a puddle across the floor.
Preposterously, Billy throws a dinner plate at the woman with the gun—Diana, her name is Diana, and she had been sitting with them only a few minutes ago, drinking wine and telling them the most bizarre story—and then he lunges at her. Violet sees the two of them disappear into the hallway. Billy slams her hard against the wall, struggling with her, grabbing one of her arms. He turns his head to yell at Violet to RUN but she can’t…
Her father’s voice bellows out from the office: “OH GOD, PLEASE STOP!”
Then two muffled shots erupt—POP POP—and she sees Billy’s sport coat flip up the back like it caught a gust of wind. Blood sprays the white wall. He groans and slumps lifelessly against the woman, pinning her to the wall with his dead weight.
A moment…
Violet runs not for the front door but, inexplicably, for the upper floors. To her room. To sanctuary. She leaps over Billy’s sprawled body, past the open office door, and pounds up the stairs. She sees the top and in a few more seconds she’ll turn the corner and be gone, out of the line of fire, toward the second flight of steps and to her room where she can barricade the door and call for help.
The bullet catches her in the middle of the lower back. Her legs go immediately numb, as if erased from her body. Her strong young muscles turn to rubber, and she collapses.
No more morning runs for you, we’re afraid. So sorry. Still, life is precious, isn’t it? Hope you enjoy it to its fullest.
Violet lies on the stairs, groaning, in shock, helpless. She waits for that second shot, the one that will put her out of her misery forever. Even then, in that moment, she figures it would be a blessing. Yes, yes, a gift. Because part of her already knows—instinctively knows—that something very bad, something very permanent, has been done to her body.
But the second shot doesn’t come.
Instead, she hears voices from her father’s office. The woman talking to him, and then she curses and then… nothing.
Violet lies there, panting, trying to find the courage, the strength, to move, to go to her father, to call for help…
When someone begins to stroke her hair.
Violet strains her neck to look up at whoever has sat down next to her.
A very old man stares down at her with blind, bloodshot eyes.
“Daddy?”
“Not the way your story should have ended,” the stranger says, then grins. “Not the way. It’s all so… horrible, isn’t it?”
He laughs as blood flows down Violet’s body, fills the seat of her underwear and seeps down the side of her waist in warm tendrils.
So much blood, she thinks. So much blood.
Then consciousness, along with the old man’s laughter, floats away, as if carried by a dark stream, to a great unknown ocean.
Part Nine
The End
One Year Later
Forty-six
Tyson sits quietly near the middle of the long, glossy white table. He counts fourteen leather chairs, mid-century design, all white and clean as the table upon which he taps his fingers. At his request, the fluorescent lights have been turned off, but bright sunshine splits the vertical blinds which run the length of the room, creating enough luminosity to give the space a glowing, if somewhat hazy, ambience.
Harry sits opposite him, and Tyson can’t help studying him from the corner of his eye.
It’s like we’ve switched places.
Which isn’t far from the truth.
In the year which has passed since the Horrible Incident, Tyson lost nearly thirty unnecessary pounds, mostly by doing nothing other than eating healthy (he hired a chef who prepares a week’s worth of meals at a time, all of which are vegetarian and “heart-smart”), and continuing the strenuous physical conditioning he had to endure for ten weeks following the surgery on his broken hip (among other damage) done by the bullet. He’d converted Violet’s third-floor bedroom into a mini-gym, purchasing a treadmill identical to the one at the physical therapist’s office, along with a universal weight machine that allows him to do enough basic lifting to keep his muscles taut and well-toned.
Sarah might have fought him on this house alteration, but Sarah is dead.
And Violet… well, Violet won’t be on the third floor ever again. Assuming she ever has a desire to visit her father, which seems unlikely given the downward spiral of their relationship. Regardless, he’d shed the heavy writer’s belt he carried around most of his adult life, and reached the optimum weight targeted by his doctor, all within four months of the Horrible Incident.
He’d needed new clothes, of course, and spent lavishly on an updated wardrobe. He’s currently sporting a Giorgio Armani navy pinstripe wool suit for the big meeting. In addition to his weight loss, he’s also been seeing a dermatologist, who began treatment on his hair that energized and regrew many of his scalp’s stagnated follicles. He’s already noticed a good amount of new hair growth in the six months since he began treatments (needles in the scalp were a small price to pay for the luxury of using a comb again). Lastly, he’d changed optometrists, thrown out all his old eyeglasses and purchased sturdy Robert Marc frames for his new prescription. All this work combined to make him appear ten years younger than his actual age, and he figures it’s more like a twenty-year swing from how he’d looked only a year ago.
Harry, on the other hand, looks like shit.
Nowadays, Harry always appeared disheveled whenever they met, but over the last few months he’d really let himself go. He’d put on weight, which gave his face a jowly appearance to go with his new potbelly. Tyson knows for a fact the guy drinks around the clock, and it’s common knowledge he’s become hooked on prescription drugs. Harry once told Tyson he needed them to “get up and get down,” and Tyson believed it.
The guy looks like he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty years.
But what strikes Tyson the most about Harry are his eyes. They’re dull and glazed. He’d lost that spark of quickness, of alertness. Energy. He reminds Tyson of a zombie. And not the fast Max Brooks World War Z-type, but more the old George Romero, shuffle-and-groan, brain-eating variety.
Tyson often considers firing him, God knows he doesn’t need him anymore (not in his current state, anyway), but always decides against it. Besides, it’s probably the necessity of having to read and re-read Tyson’s most recent books that’s knocked old Harry sideways, pushed him off his equilibrium. Ergo, he feels a little guilt, a little responsibility, for Harry’s collapse. Not to mention that long-forgotten thing called loyalty, damn it.
Tyson is nothing if not loyal.
Loyal or not, though, he’s growing impatient. They’ve been in this room waiting nearly ten minutes, and he’s about to ask Harry what the fucking balls is going on when the conference room’s glass door pushes open, and two men strut inside. The first is a young assistant in a black suit and bright red tie. He has a long, horse-shaped head topped by an oil-slick of black hair that would probably spring into unruly, boyish curls were it not cemented down. Tyson has never met the kid, and mentally dismisses him.
The second man is Jim Pruitt, the president of PMA, the fine agency Harry works for, the very same one that represents Tyson’s interests and takes its fifteen percent off the top for doing so. Tyson has met Jim.
Once.
In the ’90s.
“Hello, Mr. Parks, nice to see you again,” Pruitt says primly, what remains of his white hair neatly trimmed, his gray suit tailored snug to his manicured body like a soft glove. Tyson knows the guy is pushing eighty, but he’ll be damned if the old man looks a day over sixty-five. Tyson smiles and nods in return, but doesn’t stand up to shake any hands, and none are offered.
He acts like we do this every week, Tyson thinks, but it doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t want, or need, theatrics. He wants to sew this thing up and get home.
He has work to do.
Tyson’s most recent book did even better than anyone had dared hope, blowing past even the wildest global sales projections.
Black Altar had become a sensation.
It came out of the gate number one on The New York Times Bestseller list and, after thirty-six weeks, had yet to slip from the Top 10. Rights were sold in twenty-nine foreign countries, for a total upwards of two million bucks. It had been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film, with an A-list cast assembled to ensure it opened with a bang.
Tyson’s star has never glowed more brightly.
His new book, The Horror, is currently being sold as part of a three-book-deal to the highest bidder, and Scribner (also known as the House of King) is currently leading the pack with a ten-million-dollar offer.
And so… heeeeere’s Jimmy, Tyson thinks, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. They must drag his wrinkled old ass out for all their top clients every now and again. I’ll be sure to act impressed.
“It’s been too long,” Tyson finally replies. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Is Harry not good enough for me anymore?”
Harry laughs shakily and wipes a hand across his mouth. Tyson sees beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Ha! Well, of course that’s not the case. Harry’s one of our best and brightest,” Pruitt says, almost looking like he means it, then smiles lamely.
He certainly used to be.
Tyson grins. “Say, can I get a Coke?”
“Sure, sure.” Pruitt turns to the kid at his elbow. “This is Tim Little, by the way. My assistant.” Tyson imagines old Pruitt patting young Timmy on the ass every chance he gets. Or a spanking in the sack, he thinks, swallowing the mad urge to bust out in a fit of giggles.
Tim goes to a jet-black credenza resting along the glass wall, where an army of small bottles are lined up next to a leather-wrapped ice chest. Tim opens a bottle, dumps some ice into a glass, then walks glass and top-popped soda over to Tyson, who accepts it without a word.
“So, if I may…” Pruitt says.
Tyson holds up a hold that thought finger, and Pruitt clamps his mouth shut while Tyson slowly pours soda into the glass.
“These things are fizzy when you pour them on ice, especially when the soda is warm,” he says, staring intently at the brown foam rising near the top of the glass. “Can’t even sip the damn thing until it’s gone down…”
