Lucifer's Lottery

“—and this big, gorgeous fur-burger on her, man. Blonde. And I just can’t help it. I see that all wet and shiny in the shower, I just gotta beat off. Shit.” He grinned, showing rotten gums. “Guess I’ll probably go to Hell, huh?”

“They say only God can judge,” Hudson said lamely.

The bum scratched his ass. “She gives me canned food a lot, too, makes me feel even guiltier. I guess I’m just a shit. It sucks when ya have to eat your own nut just for the calories, ya know? You ever do that?”

Hudson paled. “Uh, no.”

“Yeah, man, when you’re homeless ya gotta do it ’cos there’s, like, a couple hundred calories in it. Been times it’s the only thing that kept me from starvin’.”

Hudson felt staggered. “There’s a soup kitchen on Fifteenth Street. Forbes, please. Go there instead.”

“Really?” The bum beamed. “Didn’t know. But what’re you doin’ here, man? You a friend of Deaconess Wilson?”

Finally a topic of conversation he could take part in. “Not really, but I did meet her once. Do you know where she is?”

The bum reached down into the front of his rotten jeans and scratched. It sounded like sandpaper. “Disappeared, they say, but . . . I don’t know about that.” He pulled his hand out and sniffed it. “See, when I’m sleepin’ in here at night, sometimes I think I hear her coming in. I can hear her car.”

“A black car?”

“Yeah. Old black car.”

Interesting. “I just saw a black car pulling out of the lot behind the church.”

“Shit! Really?” The bum scampered past Hudson, leaving dizzying B.O. in his wake. “Ain’t there now,” he said, peering out the window.

“Maybe she’ll be back,” Hudson contemplated. “Or maybe it wasn’t her.” He eyed the bum. “Say, did she ever mention a strange word to you? The word Senary?”

Forbes was only half listening. “Naw, never heard no word like that.” He picked his nose and nonchalantly ate what his finger brought out.

What am I DOING here? Hudson asked himself.

The window was turning dark, and at once the bum seemed edgy. “Shit, it’s sundown—”

Sundown, Hudson repeated.

“—and I gotta get out.”

“But I thought you said you slept here.”

“Yeah but I ain’t gonna do that no more,” Forbes said, and shuffled back toward the chancel. “Every night since the deaconess been gone, I have me these really scary dreams.”

Hudson didn’t know what compelled him to ask, “What . . . dreams?”

The bum’s eyes looked cloudy. “Aw, weird, sick shit, man, like in some city where the sky’s red and there’s smoke comin’ out of the sewer grates on every street, and black things flyin’ in the air and other things crawling up and down these buildings that are, like, a mile high, and people gettin’ their guts hauled out their asses and these big gray things eatin’ girls’ faces off their heads and drownin’ kids in barrels’a blood and playin’ catch with babies on pitchforks’n shit, and then, then this giant statue with the scariest face—oh, yeah, and a house, man. A house made of heads . . .”

Hudson stared.

“—and, fuck, last week, right before Deaconess Wilson disappeared, I was sleepin’ in the pews and dreamed that these monsters were fuckin’ with her, and reading all this evil shit like Latin or something.”

“Monsters?”

“Yeah, man. Like, just skin-covered bones and horns in their heads. Had teeth like nails made of glass. They hadda bunch of candles burnin’ in a circle and layin’ inside the circle was Deaconess Wilson with no clothes on, man.” Now Forbes looked sickened in the recollection. “They started writin’ on her, man. They’re writin’ on her, with shit, but it wasn’t just any ole shit—it was Satan’s shit. Somehow I knew that in the dream.”

Hudson was getting unnerved. He didn’t believe in shared delusions or shared nightmares. But . . .

Forbes started toward the front door, but kept talking. “And last night, shit. I dreamed I seen the deaconess walkin’ around here buck naked with her big tits and bush stickin’ out, but ya know what she was carryin’?”

“Whuh-what?” Hudson grated.

“A coffin, man.” He kept walking, his voice echoic in the nave. “But it was a little coffin. Like a baby’s. So, shit on that, ya know? I ain’t sleepin’ here no more ’cos this place gives me fucked-up dreams.” Rotten sneakers scuffed as the bum pushed open the front door and left.

Jesus, Hudson thought in the fading light.

He had every intention of following the man out, but for some reason his steps took him not toward the door but to the left, along the sides of the pews. He shined his flashlight beneath one, caught a breath in his chest, then knelt.

A shovel had been stashed there. Hudson fingered the earth on the blade and found it—

Fresh . . .

There was also a pair of work gloves on the floor that appeared soiled but recently purchased.

What the hell is this?

Stashed under the last pew in the farthest corner was a coffin.

A little coffin. Like a baby’s.

The sun had sunk quickly, like something trying to escape. Hudson looked up and down the street to find it oddly vacant. The drab housefront peered back at him as if with disdain. The Larken House, he thought. A MURDER house.

Of course, Hudson didn’t believe that a house could influence people by the things that had happened in it. A HOUSE can’t have power . . . But maybe belief was the power. Could a person’s conception of terrible events create the influence?

Hudson wasn’t sure why he would even consider such a thing. It simply occurred to him.

He traversed the weed-cracked front path, surprised by his boldness, and opened the screen door. No way the door’s unlocked, he predicted. That would be senseless.

The oddest door knocker faced him. It had been mounted on the old door’s center stile, an oval of tarnished bronze depicting a morose half-formed face. Just two eyes, no mouth, no other features. The notion made Hudson shiver:

I knock on the door and Larken answers . . .

“Here goes,” he muttered, then thought a tiny prayer, God, protect me. He grabbed the knob and turned it.

The door opened.

An unqualified odor assailed him when he entered. Not garbage or excrement or urine but just something faintly . . . foul. Hudson snapped on his flashlight, panned it around the empty living room. His stomach sunk when he discerned brown footprints tracked over the threadbare carpet. Old blood, he reasoned. From the murder night. The compulsion to leave couldn’t have been more pronounced but, I have to stay, he ordered himself. I have to find out what this is all about. He followed the footprints to a begrimed kitchen and was sickened worse when he saw great brown shapes of more dried blood all over the linoleum floor. The footprints proceeded to the microwave. Larken must’ve killed his wife and the baby in here. He eyed the kitchen table and gulped. In the corner stood a chair directly under a water pipe. And that’s where he hanged himself . . .

Then Hudson froze at a sound: a quick snap!

A cigarette lighter?

That’s what it reminded him of. His heart hammered. This was crazy and he knew it. An abandoned house in