The Impaler

There was no mercy them. None at all.

Chapter 13

The General unchained the drifter and let his naked body drop from the ceiling. He had been hanging upside down for almost a day and a half now—more than enough time for his veins to empty into the floor drain in the corner of the workroom.

The General had gutted the drifter and sawed off his head immediately upon his return to the farmhouse— sealed everything up in a garbage bag and buried it behind the old horse barn along with the remains of the first drifter. But the General hadn’t had time to fully prepare the second drifter until now. His day-life at the university and the big push toward the opening of Macbeth was taking up a lot of his time. However, all that would change once Macbeth opened on Thursday. His role would then be complete and he’d be able to focus on the most important parts of the equation.

Then again, Macbeth was part of the equation, too. A template of 9:3 or 3:1, depending on how you looked at it. Just part of the formula encoded in Elizabethan doublespeak and secret messages. Shakespeare understood the equation of 3:1 back then. Three Witches, three prophecies, three spirits— lots of threes to the one general Macbeth. But whereas Shakespeare wrote his equations on paper, the Prince wrote his in the stars

3:1 or 9:3, depending on how you looked at it.

It was right there in the stars.

The workroom had an old slop sink and spigot, to which the General’s grandfather had once upon a time attached a rubber hose. The General turned on the water and hosed off the remaining blood from the drifter’s body. And when he was clean, he dragged him to the center of the room and patted him dry with a towel. Then the General picked up the drifter’s corpse and carried it into the Throne Room.

The doorway was almost complete.

The General dressed the body in a set of white robes much like his own. He’d stolen them from the Harriot costume shop. Indeed, the Harriot theatre department had provided the General with everything he needed to accomplish his work. At first he thought he’d been drawn there because of his mother; thought he was following the path she would’ve taken had she lived. But soon after he landed the work-study job under Jennings, the General understood that he had been directed there by the Prince.

Yes, that was all part of the equation, too.

And when the drifter was ready, the General seated his headless body on the throne. The General had washed the robes and scrubbed down the throne itself with Pine-Sol, but the rotting stench of the first doorway still lingered. No matter. He had grown accustomed to it. After all, in order to be a general, one had to grow accustomed to the smell of death.

The General made the final touches on the drifter’s position—posed his hands and draped his sleeves over the arm-rests—and when he was satisfied, he slid the shelf back into place. The shelf was painted gold, too, and fit seamlessly into a slot in the back of the throne. Attached to the front of the shelf was a wooden panel onto which the General had carved a pair of doors. And once in place, the entire unit fit over the drifter’s torso like a pair of golden shoulder pads.

All the body needed now was its head.

That had been one of the messages he discovered in Macbeth—perhaps, one could argue, the most important of all the messages—but the General only recognized it a few months ago, after he was asked to design the trap for the set. The trap that opened into Hell.

Macbeth’s message about the head was actually pretty obvious if you knew what to look for. An armed Head is how the First Apparition is described—which, of course, was Shakespeare’s depiction of the Prince, the greatest of all warrior-generals. The armed Head is one of only three apparitions that actually speak to Macbeth. Thus, the General thought, it was the speaking that was most important—the High Risk/Clone Six song made that clear in the lyric, “You thought you heard me speak.” The Witches themselves speak to Macbeth in threes, but Macbeth was too stupid to understand, so anything pertaining to the actual plot of the play was of little consequence, the General thought. There were no messages in the plot. Plot was part of the smoke screen that obscured the real messages.

Yes, the messages lay in the factor of three itself. That was the equation; that was the formula as written in the stars. 9:3 or 3:1.

The armed Head then had to be the Prince as he was now—weakened, still spirit—and thus the General would need a real head to communicate with him before his return was complete.

The Second Apparition that speaks to Macbeth is described as a bloody child. That one was easy, the General thought. The bloody child was the General himself—the three to the nine or the one to the three, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

And the Third Apparition? A child crowned with a tree in his hand? That one was easy to decipher, too. That was the Prince holding the tree of life. That was the Prince resurrected.

After all, it was the words of Shakespeare’s Third Apparition that convinced the General that he had read the messages correctly.

Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care

Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are.

Be lion-mettled …

Yes, everything was clear if you understood the equation. The General had known for a long time that the body was the doorway, but once he understood that he needed a head for the Prince to speak, the only question that remained was, “Whose head?”

The answer came to him almost immediately.

And now, months later, as he placed the Prince’s head atop the shelf and stepped back to admire the completion of the doorway, the General cracked a smile when he remembered the first time the Prince spoke to him.

But there was little time for nostalgia.

The doorway was now open again.

It was time for the Prince to speak.

But more important, it was time for the General to listen.

Chapter 14

The reason Otis Gurganus always got the big bucks wasn’t because his family owned some of the best hunting grounds in North Carolina, but because he prepared long in advance. In the spring, usually five months to the day before bow season began in September. Oh yeah, the monsters—the fourteen-pointers and bigger—didn’t get that way by being stupid.

Sure, you had to know your enemy; had to know the lay of the land and the habits of the deer that lived there. But for Otis Gurganus, it all came down to preseason scouting: finding out food sources and watering holes; setting up a stand in the trees just the right distance from their bedding areas; getting settled at least a couple of hours before sundown or sunup. Commonsense stuff, but a delicate operation nonetheless. He knew from experience that the biggest bucks bedded alone and came out looking for food later than the others. Yeah, nowadays, he didn’t waste his time with anything less than a twelve-pointer with a twenty-eight-inch spread; always left the smaller ones for other hunters to keep the kill stats for his lodge high.

Gurganus hunted with a bow. Nowadays, he thought, the big bucks, the record breakers, would only get bagged with a bow. They weren’t stupid enough to stick around or congregate with other deer once they started hearing gunshots. Gurganus was still the record holder for the biggest buck bagged in North Carolina: a behemoth of a twenty-two-pointer that he nailed broadside from twenty-five yards just after his thirtieth birthday. That was almost ten years ago, but Gurganus knew his next and biggest buck was