Part 31 (1/2)
The cold, hard smile of a skull crossed his face as he strode purposefully out of the fire chamber and across the dimly lit cellar.
Where are you going?
Up.
No. Wait. They will come down.
I want to see him when I kill him. I want to see him die.
But I want to kill him in the light.
McNeely paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the yellow rectangle the open kitchen door made, smelling the smoke above.
Yes. Do it there. If you like. Then bring her down. Save her. We will make her see.
He went up the steps three at a time, fluidly and without effort, as though his legs belonged to someone else far stronger than he. At the same time he swung through the kitchen door, the door to the hall opened, and he saw framed there Wickstrom and Gabrielle, their pale, frightened faces lit starkly by the bright light in the kitchen. McNeely stepped toward them, the hate he felt for them advancing before him like a palpable force. He saw them tremble, and he smiled.
Wickstrom spoke quickly. ”The house is on fire, George. We've got to go down.” The big man's muscles tensed as though he were ready to spring backward, but he did not move, nor did Gabrielle, who stood at his side. McNeely stopped barely a foot away from them, looked into Wickstrom's face, and shook his head. ”No, Kelly,” he said. ”Not you. Gabrielle, but not you.” He thrust out a hand and grasped Gabrielle by the wrist, wrenching her away from Wickstrom's side and flinging her toward the cellar door. She gasped in pain and surprise.
Hurt, b.i.t.c.h? he thought. It'll hurt worse before I'm done.
Then McNeely turned his back on Wickstrom and started toward the door and Gabrielle. ”Wait a minute!” Wickstrom growled, closing the distance between them. McNeely felt the hand on his shoulder and whirled around. Wickstrom's arm shot up defensively, but McNeely did not strike. Wickstrom was shaking with rage. ”What the h.e.l.l's wrong with you?”
”Not with me, Kelly,” McNeely replied with the calmness of the killer who has the only gun. ”With you. You're crazy. It's been building since the first day you came here. If I let you down there, you'd kill us both (Kill them both, McNeely thought). I'm afraid of you, afraid for Gabrielle. Try to get past me and I'll kill you, I swear it. You can take your chances.”
”Let him in!” McNeely's legs suddenly shot out from under him, and he fell heavily on top of Gabrielle, who had tackled him clumsily from behind. The air went out of her for a second, but she was able to cry out to Wickstrom. ”Run! Past him!”
By the time McNeely was on his feet, Wickstrom was in the doorway extending a hand to Gabrielle, who scuttled crablike across the floor to reach it. McNeely did not have to run. He moved toward the door, thinking how much he would like to kick her in the stomach, picturing her rising from the floor with the force of his heavy foot.
But instead, he grasped her ankle with a steely grip, pulling her away from Wickstrom, and sliding her across the smooth kitchen floor as easily as if she were a child. When he released her, she continued to slide helplessly, like a cat with all its claws out, until she came up against the door to the hall.
Wickstrom left the safety of the cellar doorway to help her, but McNeely whirled, grabbing the man at his neck and groin so that Wickstrom went white, all his strength vanished. McNeely breathed hotly into his face.
”I've got to kill you, Kelly. I've got to kill you now.”
He hurled Wickstrom across the room. Wickstrom's arms flailed, and his fingers caught the edge of a huge wooden cupboard, pulling it over. Cans rattled and jars shattered on the smooth floor, spreading their contents like gouts of blood from a wounded beast. Wickstrom struggled among the broken shelves, shards of gla.s.s slicing him as he tried to right himself. Gabrielle knelt near him, her chest rising and falling in fury mixed with terror.
McNeely grinned at them both, his breath hissing raggedly between his clenched teeth. He raised a fist and smashed it into the wall, shattering the plaster. He could feel the blood start to ooze from the knife edge of his hand. Blood, he thought. And now, their blood.
”Leave him alone!” Gabrielle sobbed.
You b.i.t.c.h, how I hate you, you Kill him. Kill Kelly Wickstrom. The voice was shaking, barely in control.
McNeely took a step across the slippery floor, his shoes crunching the tiny daggers of gla.s.s. ”I warned you, Kelly, but you wouldn't listen. Now I've got to kill you.”
The more Wickstrom tried to rise, the more he floundered, like a swimmer in a dream. He began to whimper.
Gabrielle was on her feet now, shoulders hunched, neck stiffened. With a scream of rage that smothered her fear, she leaped at McNeely, punching his face and neck with heavy blows. He blocked them, sending sharp slaps to her face until her head rocked with the impact, but still she fought on.
And McNeely made the hate within him rise like a red tide, made the thoughts shriek in their power- I hate you, you c.u.n.t, you b.i.t.c.h, hate you, you stupid wh.o.r.e, want to kill you kill you kill you- -While the voice of the thing inside him cried out as though it were wounded No! You love her, love her, love ...
The voice shook, rocked, trembled, seemed to bubble insanely as if somehow s.h.i.+fting from speaker to speaker, and suddenly the voice was gone, and a new voice filled McNeely's head, filled the room itself, so that the battling woman and the man struggling to his feet heard it as well, and s.h.i.+vered at the rawness of it.
”HATE her! HATE her! Kill them! Kill them both!”
The beasts had escaped. The savage elements of the ent.i.ty, held so long at bay, had been prodded and tormented by McNeely's thoughts of violence until they had overwhelmed the part of themselves that had made them captive. The needs were free. The hunger, so long checked, had to be fed.
It was just what McNeely had wanted.
What he had thought, he had thought deliberately, and the eyes inside him had seen it as one more violent fantasy; but they had not seen the final act, because McNeely had kept it hidden even from himself. It did not require conscious thought, for he knew what it would be. Self-destruction, and with his own death perhaps the death of what dwelled within him as well. Perhaps. It had been the only chance for Gabrielle.
But now there was another.
And while the graveled voice of the pit gibbered and cackled and squalled in its triumph, he allowed himself one more conscious thought, a thought he had never had before and would never have again.
Oh G.o.d, forgive me.
”Kill them both! Now!” The voice echoed like thunder, and Wickstrom and Gabrielle groaned in agony, their hands trying to shut out the sound that penetrated their very souls. ”HATE! KILL THEM!”
McNeely held out his arms in front of him. ”Then give me your power!” he cried aloud.
”Yes!”
His arms began to tingle, his chest started to swell. He could feel his body begin to grow outward as the force rushed into him.
”All your power!” he shrieked. ”Fill me! All of your power. All!”
”Yes! ALL! ALL!”
Cloth ripped, and pain shot through him as his body expanded, as the power of a million millions entered him, as all the strengths of the evil of eternity made his flesh their home.
And, astonis.h.i.+ngly, as they possessed his body fully, his mind felt suddenly free, as if the ent.i.ty, in forgetting its apocalyptic plan, had forgotten the human keystone of that plan as well. The thing was beyond rational plots, beyond reason itself. Only madness remained, and ruled.
As through a reddened gla.s.s, McNeely saw Wickstrom and Gabrielle standing together, staring at him, their eyes wide, and it seemed that they were smaller than before, until he realized that it was he who had grown. He straightened, and felt his hair, now thinned into spa.r.s.e patches by the expansion of his skull, brush roughly against the ceiling. The thing within him shrieked in triumph and rage and hatred, as he thrust his ma.s.sive arms above his head, his fists piercing the wood and plaster ceiling like buckets of nails through gla.s.s, then descending to splinter the kitchen table, from which a leg shot off, catching the cowering Wickstrom and Gabrielle chest-high.
The pain awakened them from the trance in which McNeely's transformation had bound them, and they turned and pushed through the doorway into the hall, the door swinging closed behind them.
”Run!” McNeely half-laughed, half-bellowed, kicking the rubble of the table ceiling-high as he crossed the kitchen on huge-chewed legs. ”You can't escape!”
NO! echoed the overpowering voice of h.e.l.l. Can't escape!
He didn't try to go through the suddenly tiny door. Instead, he battered his forearms against the top of the frame so that the wall splintered and fell, and he pushed the flimsy door aside like a curtain.
The heat hit him in a wave. He looked down the hall of the east wing and saw only a rolling ma.s.s of smoke, with fingers of yellow flame barely discernible at the end, faraway candles in a foggy night. A glance to his right told him the west wing was, if not as thickly dark, at least as deadly.
The Great Hall then. There was nowhere else they could go.