There wasn’t much left of her husband when she was done—a carved carcass, innards relocated all about the room, face deftly removed and hung on the bathroom doorknob. She stood up and cast a final glance at her work and wished she could bring him back to life, just to fuck him and kill him all over again. Cut him up all over again because she knew how much it would please the Messenger.

  Everything was messages. Everything was secrets. It had been Carlton who’d delivered that first message to her…

  Carlton, Dhevic thought. The name invaded his mind, then the vision skewed, that familiar sound in his head—like the tiniest whine—that would not abate. The faint but steady ache in the pulp of his teeth.

  Who was Carlton? Wait! The man he’d just seen back at the cemetery, with Jane Ryan and her children. That was the inkling Dhevic suddenly received, and he pulled his vehicle over to the shoulder, stopped, and closed his eyes to struggle through the pain.

  The man in the cemetery.

  Carlton.

  Him, too, and then he began to see it all behind the lids of his eyes. A basement, cluttered. The man crawling out of some storage cranny. Sweating, patched with dust, knees and elbows scuffed and dirty. “What are you doing here, Marlene?” “I came to get my sorting boxes… What’s…that?” No more talk, just vicious sex on the basement floor, each just short of strangling each other at the sweat-drenched moment of their climaxes, and that was how fast it happened. The Messenger had touched them both.

  In Dhevic’s mind he could see what was in their minds as they wrapped themselves up in one another: the most detestable images, images from someplace else, a charnel house the size of a thousand cities. A sound like crashing waves but then Dhevic realized that the sound was screams, hundreds of thousands of them, millions, squalling from every direction. The sound was endless.

  Chaos. A living nightmare that never ended. Dhevic saw in flashes, white-edged images catapulted into his mind’s eye. Things flying in the sky, things that were not birds. The sky was the color of arterial blood—it even seemed to pump like blood, behind soot-colored clouds and a black sickle moon. Figures in black armor marched in ranks down smoking streets, dismembering any poor souls who dared be out. Great swords and halberd shafts sang through the air in graceful arcs, lopping off heads, arms, severing bodies at the waist, cleaving others in half from head to crotch. On the ledges of the hundred-story Ghettoblocks, Griffins and Gargoyles waited patiently for mongrel infants to be thrown from windows, tender meals to say the least. Infants were thrown from these windows quite regularly, in fact, by destitute mothers who were either damned humans, or demons, or mixes of both.

  The Outer Sectors were uncharted but existed abstractly, in various dimensions, outside of the center of the Abyss. Parched fields of corrupt soil and infernal vegetation stretched for…

  Well, no one knew. Mile-long chain gangs were a common sight in these regions, emaciated stick figures fettered together by welded cuffs and forced to work until there was nothing left of them but bones. Closer were rivers more vast than the Amazon, and bays and lakes larger than any ocean on Earth—only these bodies were filled and running with waste, filth, corpses, and blood instead of water. The most unspeakable creatures lived in these depths.

  Another image flashed, snapped into Dhevic’s mind with a sound like a stout branch cracking:

  Marlene again. The Living World behind her now, she was entering her new eternal home through a field of flames. She was naked, hair flowing and bright-eyed, as beautiful as she’d ever been. A figure was waiting for her, and when she saw it, she rejoiced. She ran to the figure with open arms, her now-immortal heart beating with love.

  The Messenger.

  “Thank you for delivering my messages, Marlene,” the entity said in a voice that was cosmic. “And you will reap your reward now, as promised.”

  Marlene’s expression went from one of total love and total devotion to an expression of utter horror. The Messenger stood and watched as horned, slug-skinned demons came up from behind and chopped off Marlene’s head with something like a cleaver. The head was placed on a stake and spiked down alongside many, many such heads. The heads were all still alive, some talking, some drooling, some grinding their teeth or chewing through their cheeks, all with their eyes still opened, all still seeing.

  Marlene’s head looked down from its perch and watched more subordinate demons make sexual frolic with her decapitated body.

  The Messenger sighed, in bliss…

  Dhevic passed out in his car seat. He wouldn’t regain consciousness for several hours.

  (III)

  Dinner was absolutely morose, but Jane sort of expected that. What do you talk about with your kids at the dinner table when you’ve just returned from a funeral? When one of the people buried was someone you knew, and that same person murdered her family and almost thirty other people?

  What did you talk about?

  Everybody picked at their food, even Kevin. Jane had made his favorite meal, teriyaki meat loaf and deep-fried asparagus, which he usually devoured with gusto. Not tonight, though. Jennifer, on the other hand, always picked at her food (she was on a skinny kick lately, something going around school), but tonight she scarcely took a bite. Carlton had left earlier, after playing a game with Kevin and helping Jennifer feed the lizard. Mel, a horrendously ugly horned toad, was actually Kevin’s pet, but he let Jennifer feed it. (Kevin didn’t want to admit that he was a little too squeamish for the feeding chores, which always required the sacrifice of a live cricket or mealworm).

  “So who won the game?” Jane asked, finally breaking the silence.

  “No one, really,” Kevin said. “Carlton wasn’t really into it, and neither was I, I guess.”

  “What was wrong with Carlton today?” Jennifer said, picking at an asparagus shaft with her fork.

  “Yeah, Mom. He was acting funny.”

  “And every now and then he’d kind of just…stare off,” Jennifer mentioned. “Sometimes I’d look at him and he’d have this weird look in his eyes. Did you notice that?”

  Jane tried to rouse herself from her sullenness. “He was just upset, honey. When things like this happen, people react in different ways. Carlton worked with Marlene for a long time, just like I did. And there’s another thing. The funeral probably reminded Carlton of something really bad that happened to him a long time ago.”

  “What, Mom?”

  Oh, Jesus, why did I mention that! She fumbled for a way out but knew there was none. “Well, Carlton had a family, too, a wife and a daughter. I think that daughter was about the same age as Marlene’s son. Anyway, his wife and daughter were killed one night in a car accident,” and she didn’t feel too bad about the white lie. They didn’t need to know that the daughter was never found, probably abducted.

  “Oh,” Kevin said, thinking about what Jane had said, trying to understand. “But this is different. Marlene wasn’t killed in a car crash. She was shot by the police.”

  Jesus, Jane thought once more.

  A pause, then Jennifer said, “Why did Marlene do it?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Why did Marlene kill all those people, and Mr. Troy and Jeff, too?”

  All Jane could do was sigh at the impossible questions. “It’s hard to explain. Sometimes something happens to people that makes them do bad things. Something happens in their brains. It’s called mental illness. It makes a person’s brain stop working right, and when that happens, sometimes people just…”

  “You mean they go crazy?” Kevin said at once.

  “Like that guy who killed Dad?” Jennifer added.

  Jane faltered. Now the two tragedies were meeting on common ground, and that common ground was her children. Again, she didn’t know what to say. She felt lost.

  Oh, Matt, she thought.

  Five years ago. She remembered that it had been raining that night; she could hear it pattering on the roof. And she had a headache because it had been a week when she’d tried to swear off coffee. She remembered the doorknocker clacking, irritatingly loud, which made the headache worse.

  It was late. The kids were asleep and she’d been lounging on the couch. In spite of the headache, though, she’d felt wonderful. She was happy. She was in love. She had a good job, a beautiful home, and lived in a nice neighborhood. She had a wonderful husband and wonderful children. She had everything she’d ever dreamed of, everything a woman could ever want. She even remembered telling herself that. How did I get so lucky? What did I do to deserve this? Thank you, thank you…

  Her husband, Matt, had just gone to the 24-hour QWIK-STOP store, to get her some instant decaf. Before he’d left, they’d made slow and luxurious love right there on the couch, with the rain pattering in the background. She loved being that close to him, his heat beating into her—the contact, the passion—his touches revitalizing her. She squirmed beneath him, his hands ranging along her body, then his mouth covering her, tending to every special spot until she was dizzy. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she’d opened her legs to him and dragged him into her. It didn’t take long after that; Jane was already there, she was coming the moment he’d entered her, then more climaxes unreeled when he stepped up his thrusts and came himself. Slow, easy ecstasy. That’s the way it always was for her when Matt was with her.

  Afterward, she felt slaked. She couldn’t get off the couch if she wanted to; she felt lazy and sleepy and full of his warmth. “I’ll have you know,” he said, dressing haphazardly in front of her, “I don’t run out in the rain to get decaf for just any woman.”

  “Just shut up and hurry,” she replied. Her nipples tingled. “When you get back…we’ll do it again.” Matt nearly stumbled stepping into his loafers and grabbing his keys. Jane had to laugh. Did he have his shoes on the wrong feet? He was gone a moment later.

  Yes, I’m very very lucky, she remembered thinking. Matt had landed a job with a good ad firm downtown, which made the neighborhood even more perfect. Her own job was close, and the schools were right here too. She listened to the garage door go up, heard the car leave, then listened to more rain, reveling in the joy of her life.

  The headache was a minor annoyance. She’d quit smoking, too, several years ago, and it hadn’t been that bad. She drifted in and out of sleep, seeing Matt in snatches of quick dreams, always smiling, his eyes always so full of love for her. And—

  RAP! RAP! RAP! Knocking on the door jerked her out of the half-sleep. The headache flared. That’s when it all came tumbling down.

  “…very sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Ryan, but it seems that your husband has just been killed…”

  Killed. The word that had just come out of the state trooper’s mouth sounded impossible. He stood there poker-faced in the doorway, his badge dripping, rain slicker glittering. No, he hadn’t just said that word, not that word. Killed.

  “Murdered, Mrs. Ryan. I’m very sorry to have to give you this news…”

  The next half hour she didn’t remember at all. Like a dream that dragged on and on—a very bad dream—with pockets of blackouts that all just kept her doubting that there was any reality at all to this. She’d been taken away, in the state police car, to the county hospital. Batches of words kept flowing in and out of her attention: “…terrible time for you and your family…” “…need you to come down to the county morgue…” “…will be calling you shortly to ask you some questions…” “…crisis counselors are available for you and your children…” “…we need positive identification of the body…”

  Harsh white lights beat down on her, but the light felt cold. She could hear them buzzing overhead. Her raincoat dripped as she looked down.

  A sheet flapped.

  “Is this your husband, Mrs. Ryan?”

  Jane stared. Just an hour ago, they’d been making love on the couch. His semen was still in her, she could feel it there, still vaguely warm—and now here was the same man. Dead on a morgue slab.

  “The perpetrator escaped from the Danelleton Clinic. It’s a private psychiatric hospital just out of town. Raped a nurse and killed her, then killed two guards and somehow got the time-locked entrance door opened. From there, he escaped on foot. This was about ten o’clock this evening, Mrs. Ryan.”

  Jane was barely hearing him, but it was enough. Matt had left the house around eleven… To get my decaf, she thought, and just wanted to collapse and die right there on the spot.

  “Fortunately, the perpetrator was apprehended by the state police at approximately eleven-thirty. But by then…”

  The trooper didn’t finish. Jane knew what he meant to say. She finished for him. “By then it was too late. By then, Matt was already dead.”

  “I’m…afraid so. It appears that your husband had just pulled into the store near the town dock, that twenty-four-hour place. There were no other customers in the store at the time. The perpetrator had already entered and killed the cashier with a hunting knife he’d stolen out of a display case. Then he just waited for the first customer to walk in.”

  “Matt,” Jane whispered, her face washed with silent tears.

  “A silent alarm had gone off, and the police had already been dispatched. When they arrived, the perpetrator was attempting to start your husband’s car…”

  What more need be said? Her entire life had been shattered in the space of an hour. By some psycho with a shoplifted hunting knife. The sheet over Matt’s body was black plasticized fabric, not cotton, so there was no evidence of blood. Only his face had been uncovered, which she was grateful for, but a very dark part of herself was wondering… How exactly had he been murdered? Where had he been stabbed? Was it slow or quick, and how much pain had he suffered?

  What had his final thoughts in life been?

  These horrible things raced round Jane’s head until she was nauseous. She was barely sentient when she scribbled her name at the bottom of some identification form for the coroner’s office, then the state trooper was helping her out of the cold, harshly lit morgue suite. She staggered out, choking on sobs, dreading the horror that awaited, the horror of having to tell Jennifer and Kevin why Daddy was never coming home again. The worse horror was knowing that she’d never see him again, and that her last vision of him hadn’t been when they were making love on the couch: it was Matt on a slab, dead, shrouded by a black sheet, his wounds unrevealed. When the trooper was helping her out, she took a stray glance to her right and saw something in a clear plastic bag lying on a lab counter. It was a hunting knife, with blood all over the blade…

  And then the memory was over and Jane was sitting at her kitchen table with her children, over food none of them wanted to eat. These kids are too young to have to see murder again.

  Jane forced herself to eat another stalk of fried asparagus, acting as though she liked it, acting as though this were a normal dinner like everyone else in the world was having. “Well, yes, honey,” she eventually answered her child’s trouble question. “Like the man who killed your father. The man was very sick; he was mentally ill. And sometimes these things happen. Nobody knows why, really. Sometimes people are born that way, and sometimes something happens to them, in their minds, and they start doing really bad things. That’s what happened to Marlene.”

  She looked at both their faces, then, hoping her explanation would help them but also knowing that it didn’t. It didn’t even come close. If anything, she realized, they’re just more confused now. “Anyway, kids, you both better get started on your chores before it’s TV time.”

  “Okay, Mom,” Jennifer said.

  Kevin jumped up, ran to the other room, and returned a moment later holding a plastic terrarium. “Mel’s gonna help me with mine, okay?”

  Jane smiled meekly, glancing at the spiky horned toad. “Sure, honey.”

  “Cool! Then we can watch TV!” Kevin celebrated. “I think that guy who wrestles alligators is on at eight!”

  The boy’s got reptiles on the brain, Jane thought. She smiled after them when they zipped out of the kitchen. Thank God I have good kids. She only hoped the whole ordeal with the killings didn’t scar them for too long.

  She picked up the dishes, elected to do them later, after which she meandered into the living room. She collapsed on the couch, then cringed, recalling what it would symbolize on a day like this: the last place she’d made love to Matt. What a mistake coming in here, but how could she get rid of the couch? All the images flooded back to her; they submerged her in the beauty of that night. First Matt’s whispers of love into her ear as he kissed her neck, his hands touching very faintly at first, then so smoothly and firmly he could’ve been making a sculpture, forming every curve and every contour, every feature of her breasts. Desire pushed her nipples out, their tips so aroused they tingled as if pinched by tweezers. His kisses deepened, his heart stepped up as all that love began to surge for her. He was pushing her legs back, opening her first with his mouth, then entering her again, just as he had that night, her bliss reemerging as a crescendo.

  Then the memory crashed.

  It was all a lie. The last thing she saw behind her closed eyes as she lay on the couch was Matt’s dead face in the county morgue.

  The smallest gasp of despair escaped her throat.

  Next, her eyes darted; she heard something, lightly at first, then with increasing volume. Pattering on the roof.

  It was starting to rain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  (I)

  Carlton awoke as he normally did—alone. He hated it after all these years, but by now he was used to it; he was acclimated. In fact, the idea of not waking up alone seemed alien. The clock glowed 4:12 a.m., yet it felt as though he’d only been asleep for fifteen minutes. I wasn’t drinking last night, was I? he asked himself. The inside of his mouth and his lips tasted awful. His eyes felt like they had sand in them. God, I feel like shit. But he hadn’t been drinking, had he? He’d been cutting down a lot lately. Christ, if I was drinking last night, I’d remember…

  Wouldn’t I?