Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

“Track’s nearly over, dude,” said Whitey from behind them.

Heidi put her headphones back on again and was surrounded again by the screams of Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent. She tried to ignore it, ready to go on with the rest of the show.

Chapter Fifteen

It was late now, the Big H shift winding to a close. Cerina sighed. Hardly made any sense for her to wait around until the shift ended; nobody ever came in this late, but that was the way Chip wanted it. And what did she care? She was getting paid, wasn’t she, and paid basically to do nothing.

She was flipping her way through the latest Cosmo . Not really her thing, but hell, someone had left it in the reception area and it was something to do, better than the Highlights the ghouls had been leafing through. After they’d left she’d gone through the issues of Highlights to make sure they hadn’t left satanic messages for children to find later, but no, they were clean. At least there was that. She shivered. She was glad to have them out of her hair. Couldn’t hardly focus with them staring at her.

The reception area was empty and quiet. Sometimes at night it felt almost a little too quiet, but tonight the problem was different. She kept hearing things, a noise, a rustling here and there, nothing she could quite put her finger on, but it made her jumpy.

When the phone rang, she nearly fell out of her chair. It was the babysitter telling her that her son had said that it was okay with her to order the sports package.

“Say what?” said Cerina.

“The sports package,” the sitter said. “He said just go on and order it up. I thought I better call you first. But that boy, he definitely loves his hockey.”

She felt herself getting angry. “I don’t care how much he loves it,” she said. “I am a working mother and I work my nails to the bone and I am not paying extra for the sports package. My goddamn cable bill is high enough. You should know better.”

“What about HBO?” said the babysitter. “He told me to add that on, too.”

“It’s already on,” said Cerina.

“So I should get rid of it?” asked the sitter.

“Oh no, HBO stays,” she said. “You know I love my True Blood .”

“ True Blood ,” said the sitter. “That’s hardly a vampire show at all. It’s more a show about men taking their shirts off.”

She sighed. “I know… I know,” she said. “It’s all garbage anyway. I don’t even know why I own a TV.”

A moment later she had hung up the telephone. Sports package , she thought, shaking her head. Any babysitter worth her salt would have known better.

She had flipped to the end of the magazine while on the phone. She was turning it back to the beginning again when she caught something out of the corner of her eye and realized that there, on the edge of the reception desk, was an antique wooden box.

Now where did that come from? she wondered. It hadn’t been there a few minutes ago, and she’d been at her desk all night. She hadn’t heard anyone come in or go out, and she hadn’t seen anyone. Didn’t make any sense that it would be there at all, and yet there it was. Weird , she thought.

There was a note on top of it, which she moved aside for a closer look at the box itself. Carved into the lid was a strange symbol. A circle, in the center of which was a cross, the head of it surmounted by a U to form an empty horned head. At the bottom was an upside-down U, the tail of the cross splitting its center. It looked like a humanoid figure, the kind of thing you might find on the wall of a cave. In addition, at the extremes to either side of the crosspiece were two dots, which gave the symbol the appearance also of being a strange face. So either a crude figure within a circle or a face or both.

Weird , thought Cerina. Probably some publicity stunt by some band, but how they smuggled it in without her seeing it, damned if she knew.

She picked up the note, opened it. It was written in old-timey script, long spidery letters. For Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne , it read. From THE LORDS .

But how did it get here? she wondered.

Easy enough to figure out, she decided, and used her laptop to access the station’s security cameras. There was one in the reception area that showed most of the room, including the desk. All she had to do was take it back a few minutes and all would be revealed.

And why not? She didn’t have anything better to do. It wasn’t like she didn’t have time to spare.

She went to the digital files and ran them back a few minutes, to a place where there was no box on the desk, and then watched. No box, no box, no box, and then suddenly a box. She must have blinked, must have missed it. She took it back again, and watched it slower this time, making sure she was paying attention, but again the same thing happened. The box wasn’t there and then, suddenly, and inexplicably, it was.

She watched it frame by frame. Same thing.

That’s impossible , she told herself. And then began to justify it. Somehow the digital file has a flaw in it, skipped over a bit of time. I’m just not getting the whole story. But there was nothing about the image to suggest that that was the case, no flash or cut or break to indicate a time shift.

It creeped her out a lot, particularly coming as it did on the tail of those two ghouls. It was as if the box had simply appeared out of thin air. No, she told herself firmly. There’s always an explanation, even if I don’t know what it is. It was ridiculous to think the box could have come out of nowhere.

She looked at the card again. Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne . Must be for Heidi. Oh well, she thought, not my problem, and made a conscious effort to go back to her magazine.

Chapter Sixteen

Herman sighed. It had been a long shift, and what they’d been given to work with made it seem longer. First the ghouls from that death metal band show up and start spouting nonsense about the goat. The goat, what was that? And then Chip ushering them out only to come back later and lecture them. Wasn’t my fault , Herman had started to say. I didn’t set up the interview. You or one of the publicity people did . But that wasn’t what Chip was saying. He wasn’t accusing them of setting up the interview, only telling them that any time somebody started going off about Satan or destroying God or burning churches they should have the good sense to pull the plug on the interview.

“If I hadn’t been here,” he said, “who knows how long it would have gone on?”

Herman sighed. Just one more reason for Chip to feel like he had to micromanage everything and everyone. “Wasn’t my fault,” Herman said again.

“This is Salem,” Chip had said. “The whole town makes a living by making historical witch burnings interesting and using them as an excuse for fun T-shirts that say things like My Other Car Is a Broom . But that only works because people think of witches as being in the past and maybe even as not being real. If people start feeling that devil worship is too close, things get very bad.”

“How bad?” asked Whitey.

“We lose sponsors,” said Chip.

“Always comes down to sponsors,” said Herman.

“Well, yes,” said Chip, adjusting his glasses. “I’m afraid it does.”

“What I’m here for is the music,” said Herman.

“Well, so am I,” said Chip, nodding. “I like music, too. It’s just that we also have economic—”

“Track’s ending,” said Whitey. “Out of the booth, Chip. We’ve got work to do.”