The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(19)

Then came Jenna. Young, mousy, freshly divorced with a six-year-old daughter. A daughter who had gone from vibrant and outgoing to sullen and stormy, a pattern that grew worse with every weekend visit to her father’s house. Jenna got smart; she slipped a voice-activated recorder into her daughter’s Hello Kitty knapsack. The audio told her everything she needed to know.

“My lawyer says there’s no guarantee how much prison time he’ll get,” Jenna told me, “or if he’ll get any at all. There are cases where men have…done this to their children and even kept visitation rights. I can’t do it, Mr. Faust. I can’t. I’ll take her and run if I have to. I’ll spend the rest of my life as a fugitive before I’ll—”

I held up a hand. “You won’t. Go home, and go about your business like it was any other day. I’ll handle everything.”

“How will I know when—”

“You’ll know.”

I didn’t need to hear the audio, but I still listened. I listened to every cry and muffled whimper. All two hours of it. I needed the hatred, coursing through my veins like high-octane gasoline, to do what I did next.

Two days later, a noise complaint led the cops straight to Jenna’s ex. He was sitting up in bed and screaming. Just staring into space and shrieking, endlessly, until his vocal cords tore and nothing but agonized wheezes gusted over his blood-flecked tongue. Last I’d checked, he was still in a padded cell at Napa State Hospital, under heavy sedation.

He’d be there for the rest of his life. Even if I wanted to, what I did to him couldn’t be undone.

I wouldn’t bring that kind of doom down on somebody’s head under normal circumstances, unless they truly deserved it. These weren’t normal circumstances, though, and a weapon was a weapon.

It was time to call upon the King of Worms.

*

I’d found the king’s name in Bentley and Corman’s back-room collection, a trail that slid in and out of history like a wisp of sulfur smoke. Here, a mention in a sixteenth-century French black magician’s manual. There, a casual aside in a colonial witch hunter’s diary. Puzzle pieces scattered across time, waiting for someone foolish enough to put them back together.

It was never quiet in prison. Even at midnight, even in the darkness, the hive was a cacophony of snoring, wheezing, coughing, whispering. Faint metal clanks and the sudden strangled sound of a sob muffled by a pillow. I pulled the paper-thin blanket aside and sat up in my bunk, crossing my legs and resting my upturned palms on my knees.

If I leaned forward and craned my neck, looking toward the tower in the heart of the hive, I could make out shapes through the darkened windows at the top. A couple of guards stood watch, looking out over the tiers through the bug-eye glass of night-vision goggles.

I straightened my back and closed my eyes.

All magic starts with a breath. I inhaled for four seconds, held my breath for four seconds, exhaled for four seconds. Then again. And again, as my thoughts slipped into the background, taking the noise and the prison along with them. My heartbeat slowed with the clock, seconds squeezing by like drops of molasses through an hourglass.

It was dark behind my eyes, but I saw a light in the distance. A silver pinprick. I walked toward it.

A chant reverberated through my skull, half in my voice, half in a stranger’s. A litany of ancient names. A warning in a language I didn’t speak. Now I walked along a winding ribbon of tarnished pewter, inlaid with swirling Hebraic script reading Malkhut, Yesod, Hod, Gevurah, Da’ath.

The ribbon rose and twisted, taking me along with it. Plunging into worlds of shadow that billowed like black smoke. I wasn’t in my cell. I wasn’t not in my cell. I was in between.

The shadow in-between, I thought as the ribbon became a road.

In the darkness, looming up before me, was a throne. A throne eighty feet tall, a mountain of crumbling black basalt. The king who sat slumped upon that throne, a giant in moldering robes with a rusted crown upon his skeletal brow, had been dead since time began.

“I come as a pilgrim,” I said, “with hands empty and cold.”

My gifts are free, rasped the King of Worms in a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere.

“Decay is the fate of all life.” I clasped my hands before me, giving the ritual response.

And madness is the fate of all sanity.

“I seek to spread your wisdom upon the flesh of the world once more.”

This would please me. Come. Receive your sacrament.

Figures emerged from the shadows at the foot of the throne. Two of them shuffling toward me in spasmodic convulsions, walking with muscles gone stiff from rigor mortis. They were women, perhaps, wearing the habits of nuns but their garb adorned with crimson symbols from no earthly order. Empty eye sockets turned my way.

I stood my ground and counted my breaths. Four seconds in. Hold. Four seconds out.

The king’s servants converged upon me. One shambled in a slow, painful circle, neck bones crackling as she kept her eyeless face trained upon mine. The other reached for me with one slender, rotting hand. Her flesh, what little remained of it, was a hive of maggots. No, some alien species like a maggot, with skin glistening, jet-black, and reflecting the pinprick light from distant stars.

The nun stroked my cheek, gentle, like a lover.

I didn’t flinch.

The other nun laid her rotted hand upon my scalp and yanked my head back with ferocious strength as she pushed downward, forcing me to my knees with my face upturned.