Phil’s final shot caught the marauder in the eye and dropped him.
Gunsmoke filled the hall like tear gas. Now a deadfall of bodies lay at his feet. I just killed twenty or thirty people, he realized, but by now the shock had worn away, to be replaced by some stoical kind of complacency. None of the Creekers had been armed, yet they’d attacked anyway. Again, it didn’t make sense. They’d willingly, even gleefully, lunged to their deaths.
More proof of Natter’s evil.
“Where is he?” he asked, tasting cordite. “Where’s Natter? He’s upstairs, isn’t he?”
Vicki, blood-spattered and gore-flecked, nodded. “In the upper room,” she said.
Natter had gone to all this trouble to get him here, and had sacrificed all these people, but—Why? Phil asked himself. He had to know now, no matter what the risk. He reached into his pocket for more bullets but found none. He didn’t even care. He took Vicki’s hand, stepping over bodies, and made for the next flight of steps.
Then, not in his ears but in his head, Natter’s voice grated like stones.
Yes! Up here, little boy…
The narrow stairs creaked underfoot. The heat grew stifling, but Phil was oblivious. He felt oblivious to everything now, to blood, to violence, to killing. He was cauterized, immune. He didn’t know what he was walking into, and he didn’t care.
The memories hovered. He walked directly to the door at the end of the cramped hallway. Opened it. Stepped in.
Only moonlight lit the room, from the open shutters. Four black corners and a block of tinseled light.
I told you we’d see you again someday, he heard in his head.
Phil glanced at each of the room’s stygian corners.
Yes, little boy, we’ve been waiting…
“Where’s Susan!” he erupted. “If she’s dead, I burn this whole place to the ground and all you ugly fuckers with it!”
This invective was answered with a low chuckle. Not many of us left to burn, hmm? You’re quite handy with a gun.
“You killed those people, Natter!” Phil railed. “You ordered them to kill themselves! You sent them to their deaths.”
No, rather, I sent them to paradise. The time has come; we’ve all suffered long enough. They are in paradise now, which is where they deserve to be. Tonight our travails are at an end. Tonight our curse is lifted. Tonight we start anew.
The darkness, now, seemed to coagulate; Phil felt he was standing in a grotto with the moon, like a spotlight, casting an aura about him.
Welcome home, the voice croaked.
“This is a hell house, it isn’t my home.”
Oh, but it is. We’ve waited a long time for your return.
“What do you want?”
You.
“But you had me earlier in the parking lot at the club. Why didn’t you take me then?”
Because there were still a few things you needed to remember, weren’t there? Hmm?
The dream, he realized. The final part of my childhood memory. He gazed cockeyed into the dark. The last piece of the puzzle. “You can’t know when and what I’m going to dream,” he protested.
I know lots of things about you, Phil.
Because I’m your father.
“Bullshit.”
Think about it, son.
He did then. The darkness focused. Orphaned as an infant. Raised by an “aunt.” Could it be possible?
“But I’m not a Creeker,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m—”
You’re what?
Phil’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
You’re perfect.
“We’re both perfect, Phil.”
But it wasn’t Natter who’d said it. He recognized the voice at once.
“Susan?” he said, squinting.
Moving very slowly, Susan emerged from the dark. But she was fully dressed, smiling softly.
Unhurt.
“I thought—”
“That they were torturing me, raping me, killing me?” she finished. “If you didn’t think I was in danger, then you never would’ve come.”
A trick, he realized. All this time she’s been one of them.
“And, of course,” she added, “that wouldn’t be any way for them to treat your sister.”
My…sister?
“You should have read those books a little more closely, Phil,” she said. “We’re both Creekers, but we’re perfect. It took a long time for our father to breed us. Trial and error, for ages.”
Then Phil thought back to the books about inbreeding.
The more intensively inbred the community, the more astronomical the chances of an undefected birth. One chance in thousands, he remembered. And Susan and I are it.
“We’re living proof, aren’t we?” Susan said. “No red eyes, no black hair, no physical deformities. We’re the offspring the Creekers have been trying to produce for a hundred years. But—” She took another step closer. “Too bad for me I was born a woman. The progenitor has to be male.”
The Mannona, Natter said.
“You,” Susan said. “Haven’t you realized that by now? It’s you.”
Then Phil remembered what Vicki had told him about Creeker speech—dyslalia—how spoken words were inverted. Skeet-inner meant skin-eater. Ona-prey-bee meant praise be to Ona. And now:
“Mannona,” he said in a voice that was dark as the room. “And Onnamann.”
“The Man of Ona,” she translated.
Me, Phil thought.
The darkness seemed to hush.
The moonlight radiated.
Phil’s heart slowed.
“We’re hybrids,” Susan informed him.
Vicki had mentioned that too, hadn’t she? Hybrids. Ona, she’d said. The female inbred of the demon and the Creekers. Most of the Creekers don’t even look human. Because part of their bloodline isn’t human…
And what had Natter said, just moments ago?
Tonight we start anew.
Something thunked to the floor. Phil stared down. It was Vicki’s head—cleanly severed—just dropped from Susan’s scarlet hand.
Poor little whore, Natter’s black voice remarked.
“The whole thing, I’m sure you realize now,” Susan said, “was a set-up. To lure you here at precisely this time.”
“Why?” Phil asked dryly.
“It’s generational.”
“What is?”
The fertility of our god, Natter answered.
“Skeet-inner,” Phil whispered. “Ona…”
The thing you saw when you were ten, Vicki’s dead words echoed now.
Two more figures—Druck, and another male Creeker, grinned as they came out of the obsidian dark. But they were dragging a third figure by—its elbows.
The figure was naked. Bound and gagged.
