The mailman handed her a clipboard. “Just sign at the x, please.”

  When she took the clipboard, she frowned. The mailman was staring at her body, feeling her up with his beady eyes. Great, came her cynical thought. She was realistic, of course. She could have put a robe on before answering the door or wrapped a towel around her. I guess I’m getting what I asked for. His stare made her distinctly uncomfortable but— If I don’t like it, I shouldn’t wear stuff like this around other people. Her peach-hued bikini couldn’t even be called a thong, it was more G-string than anything, the cups of the bra minuscule, and the shiny polyester patch down below stretched so tightly across the triangle of her crotch, very few details of her sex were left unrevealed.

  Goosebumps crawled up her back when she returned the clipboard. The mailman was staring directly at her crotch. He was grinning.

  “I don’t appreciate that,” she said.

  “Don’t dress like a stripper if you don’t want to be stared at by men,” he couldn’t have replied more rudely. “Christ, lady, your pussy looks like you painted it.”

  Claudette was revolted. The man was even drooling! “You’re not the regular mailman. What’s your name? I’m reporting you.”

  “My name’s Martin Parkins, and guess what, bitch? I don’t even work for the post office any more. So go ahead and report me.”

  “Martin Parkins,” she repeated. She wouldn’t forget, and she was going to call the police, too. Was he impersonating a postal employee? That sounded like a federal offense. But if so…

  What was this slip of paper in her hand?

  “At least read your telegram before you report me,” the man said.

  Claudette looked at the paper. It was no telegram, it was just a sheet of Xerox paper on which had been scrawled: WELCOME TO HELL.

  Then Claudette was screaming, but only for a second. Martin had shoved her into the room and, almost instantly, from behind, a hand clamped over her mouth. Someone had already gotten in the house! But the hand…

  What is th— she thought.

  There was something wrong with the hand. It wasn’t normal. It stank, it was covered in slime, and the long, thin fingers seemed to have more joints than a normal hand. Her eyes bulged as she was held in place by the second intruder, but then it occurred to her—in sheer horror—that several other men must be in the room, because she could feel more hands wrap around her from behind, expeditiously molesting her. A half-dozen more hands at least. Who were these people?

  Shock was beginning to dim her vision; she noticed the mailman close the door and lock it, then he walked over and sat down on the couch. He sat intently at the edge of the cushion, staring raptly as Claudette squirmed in the multi-handed embrace. “I’m at the end of the line, if you know what I mean,” he said, and lit a cigarette. “Sloppy Sevenths. I’ll watch until it’s my turn.”

  But Claudette was essentially incomprehensible now. The room seemed darker than usual. Had the other men closed the drapes? But she also noted weird orange light flickering behind her. And what those awful hands were pinning her down to wasn’t the plush heather-green living room carpet.

  It felt like mud.

  Shapes shifted above her. Long fingers wormed at her crotch and breasts, popping off the bra and tiny bottom. Someone, or something, was kissing her now; Claudette was so revolted she almost threw up when a tongue that seemed a foot long pushed through her pressed lips. When she bit the tongue, nothing happened. It was like biting leather. The only reaction from her attacker was a hot chuckle that flowed into her mouth, then the tongue went all the way down her throat until she could feel it wriggling in her stomach. Meanwhile, fingers invaded her sex, and her breasts were plied like raw baker’s dough. When Claudette began to convulse from suffocation, the impossible black tongue retracted. She heaved in a breath just before she would’ve died.

  “They’re called Spermatademons—ain’t that a hoot? I mean, that’s what they call them down there,” the mailman rambled on. “I had to be on the other end of that, too, just like you, only with me, it was part of my punishment. Oh, I guess you don’t know what I’m talking about, huh?” A bleak laugh. “Let me put it this way: it hurts to sit down. Those boys ain’t particular.”

  One was on her now. The other pinned her shoulders down and were spreading her legs with hands that gripped like metal bands. Her vision began to clear; when she turned her face away, she saw—

  Where-where-where AM I? she managed to think.

  Claudette wasn’t in her living room. She was in a cave whose hewn rock walls oozed steam. And she noticed at once the source of the weird flickering orange light. Torches topped by wads of pitch were flickering from various areas, their hafts stuck into rock. It looked medieval.

  I’m in Hell, she realized through the madness.

  “It’s this,” the mailman said. He pulled something out of his bag that at first she thought was a club. “You got any idea what this is, Mrs. Peterson?”

  Claudette could hardly answer. Huge fleshy things were entering her, thrusting in and out like pistons. Crude and horrific as it all may have been, she couldn’t deny her arousal. She climaxed with each of her abductors…

  But she could hear, and she heard the mailman say this: “It’s kind of like a key, I guess. It opens a door that they call a Rive. You’re on the other side of that door right now.”

  Something was changing her. She should be horrified but she wasn’t any longer. She was excited, she was eager for each new lover who climbed on top of her. The mailman was still holding that club-like object. It must’ve weighed twenty pounds: a stout bar of old metal that looked like iron, a ring at one end and a starlike ball at the other end.

  “This is a bell-striker, Mrs. Peterson,” the mailman was going on, “and believe me, it ain’t from around here. Has special powers is what the Messenger told me. It opens that door I was telling you about. It opens that Rive.”

  Claudette wasn’t really even hearing him anymore. She was climaxing in spastic quakes. Even when she saw the details of these impossible men who were taking her, she wasn’t disgusted. Brownish veins could be seen through their semi-translucent white flesh. Primeval, huge-eyed faces with fang-filled slits for grins, heads misshapen like small boulders. And horns.

  So her lovers weren’t men at all.

  She stole a peek out of the cave, could see more of the void beyond. It looked endless. She saw masses of naked people, some deformed, some missing limbs, others only retaining part of their former humanity after undergoing some process of hybridization. She could also see a lake not too far distant from the mouth of the cave. The lake was steaming, and it wasn’t water that filled it, it was eons-old blood, bubbling. From the lake things that seemed to have beaks rose up and plodded into the mass of humans, tearing into them, ripping off strips of skin and pecking out eyes with gleeful abandon. Some were actually pulled into the lake, screaming as they were devoured by still more unspeakable things below the surface. All the while, the chasm echoed in a never-ending cacophony of moans, laughs, shrieks, and screams.

  Claudette was pretty much insane by now, out of her mind in an erotic frenzy. She didn’t care what happened to her. She wished she could be here always. She could see the mailman on the other side of the Rive. He put the bell-striker back in his bag, then took off his clothes. Around Claudette, the pallid demons lay exhausted; she’d spent them all and only wanted more. She panted, muck-covered, inflamed, and looked up.

  The mailman’s naked body looked strange. His stomach was swollen and his skin was covered with blue and black blotches. “I’m dead,” he said and kind of chuckled, “but the Messenger keeps me alive to do his business. He has messages that need to be delivered, and I’m helping him. I’m being punished—” he held his hands out, to display his slowly rotting physique—“so this is what I get. I gotta earn back his respect, you know? Now I’m gonna take my turn, and when I’m done, I’m gonna slit you open and clean you out like a Thanksgiving turkey. Nothing personal. It’s just what I gotta do, okay?”

  He began to walk forward, approaching the Rive. Claudette waited anxiously, squirming in anticipation. But then the mailman stopped and yelled, “Damn it!”

  He was looking down at his bare groin. His penis, which had already halfway gone to rot, fell off. It sat curled on the carpet like a lost tidbit.

  “So much for me having my turn. Ain’t that just my luck? I’ll tell ya, life, death, either one. They’re both a kick in the ass.”

  The mailman went back to his bag and pulled out a large carving knife.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  (I)

  The door exploded, flying to bits out of its steel security frame. Two uniformed policed stepped quickly back with the door-ram, while several more skirted around them and tactically entered the house, guns drawn and aimed high and low. The house was surrounded by local mobile units, several ambulances, and some county sheriff’s department cars.

  “What’s the name here?” one cop just outside asked. He was watching the windows.

  Another cop, surveying the corner of the house, said, “Peterson. No rap sheet, no calls, nothing. Husband’s at work so it should only be the wife inside.”

  “So what’s the scoop?

  “Neighbor said he thought he heard a scream after seeing a mailman at the door. But there’s no mail truck.”

  “What is all this mailman shit?”

  Inside, the first team clearing the living room stopped cold, their faces blanched as they looked down at what lay on the floor.

  “Chief Higgins!”

  Steve entered and stopped, looking down just as grimly.

  The thing on the floor was only vaguely recognizable as a human female. This is madness, Steve thought. He felt instantly sick to his stomach. Had the woman actually been skinned? Who could do something like that? And how? The crimson stick figure lay asprawl. Even the face had been cut off, but the scalp had not; the expert cutting job left the shining perfectly straight red hair intact and carefully lying over the victim’s shoulders. An open gash in her abdomen gaped, the cavity within empty. Most revolting of all was the position: almost a lewd pose, legs spread, arms out like a woman in wait of her lover on the living room floor. A grislier thought occurred to him with the image. Last night he’d made love to Jane…on the living room floor.

  He grit his teeth, tried to blink the atrocity out of his head, but it wasn’t working, even when he looked away.

  This couldn’t possibly be Parkins, he tried to convince himself.

  “Aw, Jesus!” another cop said, backing away from the coat closet.

  Steve went over and stared. In the closet hung several light jackets, a pool robe, and a few raincoats. But right at the end hung what could only be Mrs. Claudette Peterson’s skin, hanging there like a suit of clothes. The only part not intact was the face, which had been cut off at the neck and hung through an eyehole off a peg on the hat rack. “Check it out, Chief,” one of his uniforms said. “No big surprise by now, huh?”

  Steve practically staggered over to the voice. What now, what now? What could be worse?

  His gaze fell on the floor of the bedroom, where a pile of organs lay. The other cops were looking away, silent. Then Steve’s gaze lifted to the wall, to the blood-fashioned symbol that he was now beginning to see on a regular basis around here—the bell with the star-shape for a striker.

  (II)

  Jane’s eyes widened on the drawing: the bell with the star-shape for a striker. At first, she was so on edge by Dhevic’s sudden appearance at her office that she didn’t fully focus on what he was saying. “Have you seen this before?” was the very first thing out of his mouth, and then he’d opened a leather folder that contained what appeared to be several thick polycarbonate sheets. The plasticized material was being used to protect a piece of paper, from what Dhevic described as a very, very old book. He placed the first protective sheet on her desk blotter. “It’s an engraving in a tome entitled Das Grimoire de Praelata,” and then he’d gone on to talk about how these occult visionaries called prelates some thousand years ago had used psychic powers to establish mental contact with particular souls in Hell. Some of these prelates were artists and engravers, and here, supposedly, was one of their engravings.

  She easily recalled the nature of the source, a so-called “expert” on the occult, as seen on tabloid shows. However…

  Something about him, this tall, intense, middle-aged man, seemed genuine.

  “Have you, Ms. Ryan?”

  Jane’s vice was grinding. “Have I seen this symbol before? Yes, I have.”

  “I know you have,” he said very mysteriously, and she was too uneasy to ask him why he’d put it that way. Then he went on, “It’s a quasi-geometric shape that we call a campanulation. Effectively, it’s left at the scene of a ritual murder, written in blood. It’s thought to be more of a homage—or simply more powerful—if it is the blood of an oblation.”

  Jane sat listless at the desk, eyes glancing up and down, down at the engraving in the old book, then up to him. He’d remained standing, his presence filling the small office. “Oblation?” she asked. “What’s that?”

  “The blood of a sacrifant—I should say the blood of an innocent person used as the body of a sacrifice. The only more powerful offering is the campanulation left in the blood of an acolyte, one who sacrifices himself as a suicidal tribute. Have there been any such suicides that you know of, Ms. Ryan?”

  She didn’t answer, at least not vocally. But there had been, hadn’t there? Marlene. Carlton. Both had killed themselves, leaving the symbol in blood. Theirs and their victims.

  Dhevic continued, with that floating, accented voice, while pointing to the engraving. “The campanulation. A bell shape. It’s a representation of that bell, Ms. Ryan. Note the star-shaped clapper.”

  “I see it,” she said, focusing on the engraving. A bell in a church steeple.

  “Something’s happening here, Ms. Ryan. You know that it’s not merely coincidental.”

  “How do I know that?” she asked, not sure what point there’d be in challenging him.

  Was he smiling in that beard? “You know. You’ve got ritualized crimes from twenty years ago corresponding to identical crimes today, and the single-most pertinent common denominator is—”

  “My post office,” Jane finished.

  “That’s correct. And what I must know is this: do any of your employees belong to any radical religious cults, or conform to odd religious beliefs?”

  Jane smirked. “No. The police already asked me the same thing—”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “—and I told them the same thing. I told them no.”

  “But you’re struggling with that, aren’t you?”

  Jane paused in a weird silence. She was struggling with that. Steve believed it, he simply couldn’t make a solid connection. But even Jane couldn’t argue with the logic. “I agree. There is some kind of cult connection, there has to be. It’d be illogical at this point to not believe that.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Jane looked up at him. She simply didn’t know what to make of the man. Steve had implied that Dhevic might even be part of it, part of the cult connection camouflaging himself with his credentials, but now that Jane had met the man, she didn’t buy it. She didn’t necessarily like him…but she didn’t believe he was a killer. She could see it in his eyes. I should just call Steve, tell him the guy’s here. He’d want to talk to him anyway. But when the thought left her head, Dhevic was looking at the phone, then glanced back to her with a raised brow.

  This is really friggin’ creepy. “Please feel free to take a seat, Professor Dhevic.”

  “Thank you.” His suit was a nice cut, she could tell, but it was old, worn. He looked like someone in and out of the skids. But he must have money. Those television tabloid shows, the books he’d written? He was an enigma.

  Next, he asked, “Are you aware of any sort of a peculiar iron object on the premise?”

  Jane winced. “What?”

  “I know it’s an odd question. Something about a foot and a half long, a rod, Ms. Ryan, an iron rod. It has a ring on one end and a—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just when I was starting to think you’re harmless, you ask me something really nutty like that.”

  He looked right back at her. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’ll leave at once, if you’d prefer. Or…feel free to call the police, if you’re suspicious of me.”

  A chill went up her spine. First she’d thought about calling Steve, then Dhevic was looking at the phone. Now he’d mentioned calling the police…

  Jane just went ahead and said it: “Now I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re psychic, you can read minds—”

  He fully smiled this time. “No, Ms. Ryan. Nothing like that. I’m nothing like that at all.”

  “I saw you, several times, on television. Documentaries, and—”

  “Silly, overdone tabloid shows about satanism. I’m not very proud of those appearances, but they do serve several purposes. One, foreknowledge, any at all, is better than none, because it keeps people thinking. It doesn’t matter if it’s a frivolous documentary on late-night cable. It keeps people aware.”

  Jane just shook her head. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And, two, I need the money. I have benefactors but let’s just say that they’re sometimes less than timely in delivering my allowance. It’s not an office I can go to, there’s no cashier or pay clerk. I have no home, no base, I’m constantly on the move in my responsibilities. Think of it this way: I work for an establishment, like a traveling salesman, only I’m not selling anything, I’m investigating something.”