anyway.”
“Why do you do these things to people?” He struggled even now to resist her, but the woman dripped sex. Disgust filled him. There, with the lust. “Why are you a part of this?”
“Like the card says, we’re just facilitators.”
“Of what?”
“Human frailty.”
“But why?”
“Why not?”
“What do you possibly gain from all this?”
Her arrogance resembled that of any great predator, one completely confident in its invulnerability. “You can’t figure out if you want to fuck me or kill me with your bare hands,” she purred. “Deep down, you want to do both. Don’t let it tear you up. Truth is neither of us can help it. A mouse to cheese or a moth to flame, it’s no different. It’s the way we’re wired.”
“Does that help you sleep at night?”
“I suppose it would if I slept at all.”
Jeff ignored his fear and motioned to the shrouded person with his chin. “Who is that?”
“Doesn’t matter, aren’t you here to see Mr. Hope?”
He nodded.
She cocked her head toward the far side of the room and the door she’d come through. “Afraid I can’t stay, got a plane to catch.
Things to do, people to see. Business is booming. But then, our business is always booming.” Jessica winked, strolled by him then stopped. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said without looking back, “it was never really about you.”
The sound of her footfalls and the plastic suitcase wheels rolling along the floor resumed then grew fainter until they too fell silent, as if absorbed by the building itself. All that remained was whispers and the incessant dripping.
Jeff walked across the large, open, windowless room, taking a wide path around the shrouded figure. But when he was within reach, the woman-he could tell now that it was female-jerked her head up from prayer. The cloak slipped free of her head and fell down around her neck, revealing a hideously pale and sunken face, the skin so withered it seemed nearly mummified. Where her eyes should’ve been were two empty black sockets, remnants of blood and fluid still staining her cheeks like war paint. Horrified, Jeff took a step back.
The woman’s lips-thin, taut and bloodless-parted and her whispers became a frail voice. “Is someone there?”
It was impossible to tell how old she was, but the woman was more than likely middle-aged. Or had been…
“Are you there?” she asked, hands reaching out in darkness. “I can…I can hear someone…please… won’t you help me?”
Jeff swallowed. Hard. “I don’t know what to do.”
The woman’s head swiveled back and forth, trying to pinpoint the exact location of his voice. “Please, they’ve left me here and I don’t know what’s happening. There’s been some sort of mistake, I…I’ve been praying but…”
Jeff brought a trembling hand to his mouth. A pair of black glasses with unusually thick lenses lay at the woman’s feet. “Ms. Gill?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding furiously. “Do I…Do I know you?”
“What has he done to you?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t see. Please…” Her withered hands reached for him again, the fingernails torn free and the skin beneath sewn closed with thick leather-like thread. The far door creaked as it opened slightly. Jeff and the woman both turned toward the sound, but she began to groan in horror as she fell to her side and curled into a fetal position. “No, oh-oh no-don’t…”
A scratchy sound echoed through the room from just beyond the door, a stylus dropped into the groove of an old record album. A keyboard intro was followed by a haunting guitar riff, and as the eerie vocals kicked in, Jeff realized someone was blasting Iron Butterfly’s classic rock epic In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
Jeff headed straight for it, stopping just before the cracked door. He reached out and pushed, swinging the door open wider. The music, deafening now, spilled out from a turntable and stereo system inside the narrow room. Standing in the shadows was the tall man.
Dressed in the same black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie, he seemed oblivious to Jeff’s presence, stood pencil-straight and swung his long arms up and down to the beat of the song, above his head then down behind his back in slow arcing motions, snapping his fingers and lolling his back and forth as if his neck had broken. The look of abject sorrow he’d had prior was gone, replaced with a blank, emotionless expression. Eyes closed, he continued to dance, arms swinging. Jeff noticed a desk against the wall to the man’s right, a cloth spread out across the top upon which numerous items had been placed. A closer look revealed a neat row of various medical utensils and instruments of torture and mutilation. Most were pristine and shiny silver, but a few were stained with blood and other fluids, as well as small chunks and slivers of what was probably human flesh.
Sitting just beyond the tall man, in the far corner of the room, was Foster Hope. The old man was slumped in a rickety wooden chair; head bowed and chin touching his chest as if in sleep. He too seemed oblivious to Jeff’s presence. Though he wore the same suit and tie, this time he looked different.
Hope’s hands, resting in his lap, now resembled those in Jeff’s dream, the manicured fingernails replaced with long, thick, bone-white talons that seemed better suited to the paws of a large jungle cat than the hands of a human being. His white hair was a bit mussed but it wasn’t until he slowly raised his head and turned to Jeff that the other changes became evident as well.
“Christ Jesus,” Jeff whispered.
The old man’s eyes were no longer a brilliant emerald. The lenses had been removed and all that remained were solid black orbs, moist, inhuman, disturbing inky pools. His lips parted and curled up into a hideous smile, the large false teeth gone, replaced by bloody, diseased gums he slurped at with a black and forked reptilian tongue.
Jeff felt his legs give out but he caught the edge of the desk at the last moment and leaned onto it, preventing himself from collapsing to the floor. Mind reeling, he stared at Foster Hope, wanting to turn away but unable to, his vision blurring and becoming watery.
Just off the room was a bathroom, the door open. Propped across a shelf above a large sink was a human head, eyes gouged out, mouth slashed wide into a freakish and Joker-like grin. Several others lay in a heap on the dirty tile floor. Blood plopped in a slow, steady rhythm from scraps of flesh that had once been a neck down into the sink, and though the music made it impossible to hear, Jeff now knew the source of the incessant dripping.
Everything in his being told him to run, but his body refused to respond. Shaking, he held tight to the desk until his vision slowly returned to normal.
The tall man fell still. After a moment he noticed Jeff for the first time. Eyes never leaving him, he lifted the arm from the record and the music stopped. The dripping sound returned as he rolled the instruments up in the cloth, tucked them under his arm then strode back out into the large room. The shrouded woman began to scream, and as Jeff looked back over his shoulder he saw the tall man dragging her by her hair across the floor and out into the hallway. He put his hands to his ears and fell across the desk. “Stop it, for-for Christ’s sake, stop it!”
The screams grew softer and were eventually silenced. Foster Hope sat grinning and staring at him with his onyx eyes throughout.
Jeff struggled back to his feet, clinging desperately to whatever scraps of sanity he could still claim, and saw that somehow the old man had returned to his previous state. Perhaps he’d never really changed at all. Or perhaps Jeff had only really seen Foster Hope as he truly was for that one horrifying instant.
“So good to see you again, Jeff,” the old man said. He rose from his chair and closed the bathroom door, emerald eyes sparkling as he smiled brightly.
“The tapes,” he managed.
“There, as I promised.” Hope motioned to two unmarked video cassettes on the desk. Next to them was a large wastebasket, a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches. “I assumed you’d want to destroy them.”
