Part 30 (1/2)

Oh! Lord! What IS that?

It's not a person who pushed you to the floor, it's the stench that plowed out of the room. It's an awful hot rotten smell mixed with another stench like latrine dirt on a sweltering day.

You pick yourself up and look into the room- -and that's when you scream a hundred times louder than when Mr. Morris was pus.h.i.+ng the sewing needle into the tip of your nipple.

You're looking down at a naked woman dead for days, spread-eagled on a blood-caked bed. A large ax had been dropped right between her legs.

Just before you fall backward, you think you noticed one more thing: A b.l.o.o.d.y fetus on the floor, but it's tiny, not much bigger than a field mouse. It looks like someone had squashed it under their shoe.

Footsteps thunk up the stairs, and now you think you also hear a dog barking.

The second man gags, ”In the name of-What's that stench? p.i.s.s?”

”What the h.e.l.l-” The marshal looks into the room.

The other man helps you up, but looks like he wants to throw up over the stair-hall rail. They all got enough of a look.

”Guess we done found Mrs. Gast...”

”somethin' pure evil's goin' on in this place.” He jerks his head. ”Where's that dog barkin'?”

The other man leaves you to lean against the rail. ”This door here.”

You bring a hand to your chest. ”It's locked...”

Ka-KRACK!

His booted foot implodes the door. More meaty rotten stench gusts into the hall, so dense it's like a cloud, and a skinny mud-tan mutt tears out of the room and disappears down the stairs. But the man is already on his knees and then he sidles over. He's pa.s.sed out.

The marshal looks in the room but when he turns back to you it's with a face leeched of all color, and though it can't be true you could swear that in the time it took him to look into that room, some of his hair turned gray.

He puts his hand across your eyes and turns you around. ”You get out'a this house, girl. You get out right now, and don't come back.”

”But, sir, what's in the-”

”You get out now! You run to the town square'n ring the bell and tell every man to get on up here to help me.”

”But-”

”Go!” He shoves you toward the steps. You stumble down the staircase. You can hear him weeping, ”G.o.d, protect us, my dear G.o.d, protect us...”

Downstairs, the s.p.a.cious foyer seems smaller now, and very dark.

When you turn, your heart freezes again and you almost scream.

There's a man sitting at a desk, scribbling. He looks up at you as if irritated.

”Who are you, child?” a creaky voice asks.

”Harriet...”

”Oh, yes. The wh.o.r.e...” He gets back to scribbling. You recognize him a moment later from the stupid red hat and metal nose: one of Mr. Gast's employees, who once paid to watch you s.h.i.+t.

”You should leave here,” he mutters without looking at you. ”Even in the grievous sin of your wh.o.r.edom, you are more blessed than anyone to ever set foot here.”

You don't understand him at all.

He stands up at the desk. In his hand is a sheaf of oblong papers, which he slips into one of the desk's many letter slots. ”I won't be needing these anymore”-his tiny eyes scan the dark room-”just as this place will no longer be needing me.”

Now his hand is extending, his palm full of gold coins. ”Take this. I'll write you a receipt.”

Your mouth hangs open as you shake your head no.

His fingers pluck up one coin. ”At least take this ten-dollar piece. It belongs to you, does it not?”

”No...”

”My time here is at an end, and so is yours.” He removes his false nose to reveal gnawed holes. ”Say your prayers, fornicatress. You've much to be grateful for. You will live a long, long life, and you will have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and you will die on the day before Trotsky is murdered.”

Your stare gapes. ”What?”

He walks away into a side hall.

It's as if the house ejects you; you nearly fall down the front steps. Mr. Gast's corpse has turned on the rope again, to face your exit. You stumble down the path, exhausted by your witness. Before you begin to run, you see the last edge of the sun melting over the distant cotton and soya fields, backlighting so many skulls on sticks, and you also see the tan mutt that escaped the room upstairs humping the other stray dogs in the yard, and that's when you feel as if Lucifer himself has just blown you a kiss...

You fall to your-

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

I.

-knees before the toilet to vomit harder than he ever had in his life. Holy ever-living h.e.l.l, Collier thought in the mad, wincing turmoil. He didn't remember stumbling to the bathroom, but he did remember the nightmare...

With each pulse of vomit, the alarm pulsed in the bedroom. The images from the nightmare a.s.sailed him, and ghosts of discomfort throbbed at his a.n.u.s and his left nipple. When he was done, his stomach squeezed dry, his vomit floated in the toilet like an inch of oatmeal.

The worst dream of my life...

He sat on the bathroom floor, head between his knees.

It was the first time he'd ever dreamed he was a woman- Not just a woman, a Civil War wh.o.r.e...

When he could bear the buzz of the alarm no more, he straggled up and smacked it off. It was twenty-five before seven. Oh, s.h.i.+t, he recalled. Church. While showering, the distress in his belly sharpened when he recalled the ludicrous incident with Lottie and, worse, the awful hallucination of those four small hands t.i.tillating him...

And the dog.

I got the triple whammy last night, he groaned to himself as he dressed. And didn't J.G. Sute say that someone was murdered in the bath closet?