Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

Very carefully she got her limbs under her. She felt something tear painfully in her arm, a wound ripping open again. She thought of standing up, but no, she wasn’t sure she could manage, and she worried she would be too visible. No, she needed to be as inconspicuous as possible, needed to try to make it out before they realized that she wasn’t dead after all.

There it was, the door to the hall, light coming through it. She put one hand out in front of her and dragged her way a little closer to it. Then she waited. When nothing happened, she pulled herself with the other hand and then managed to get her legs partly under her and begin to crawl.

It didn’t seem like she was the one crawling. The pain made her feel so distant from her body that it felt like she was a ghost hovering above herself, somewhere near the ceiling, watching someone else crawl. She kept the body below her moving toward the door, trying not to feel its pain, trying just to keep it moving.

Her fingers crossed over the threshold and pulled her partway out. I might survive after all , she thought. All she had to do was drag herself the rest of the way out and down the hall and into her apartment and call 911, then staunch her wounds and try to stay alive until they sent an ambulance for her.

Then she was all the way out and into the hall. She came back from where she was hovering like a ghost over her body to occupy the body itself and had to stop herself from screaming in pain. But being in the body made her feel more capable as well. She could feel the adrenaline pumping within her and she managed to crawl up the wall and pull herself to her knees. From there, with a tremendous effort of will, she stumbled to her feet and stood there, braced against the wall, out of breath. The wall was all bloody, she saw, from where it had touched her, and she knew if she turned around she would see a swath of blood along the hallway floor as well from where she had dragged herself. Don’t look back , she told herself. Move forward.

She would have done it, too, only when she looked up she saw a woman standing there, a tall woman with an austere face and dark eyes and a cruel mouth. She stood dead center in the hallway, blocking Heidi’s path.

The hallway suddenly seemed bled of sound. Heidi couldn’t hear the rustle of the wind outside, nor the settling of the house, nor even the sound of her own breathing. It was as if the whole hallway had been swaddled in cloth and removed from the world, as if nothing beyond this hallway existed. She could not feel her body either, but it wasn’t as if she was above it now, only as if she was in it but unable to feel it. She felt strangely at peace. There was even a comfort to this, but a comfort, she couldn’t help but think, that must be like the comfort you might find in being dead, if you could be aware of being dead. And it was as if she was under a spell.

She stared at the woman in the hallway, wondering whether she should try to go around her, not even certain she’d be able to move. Before she could make her decision, the woman began to speak in a soft, almost inaudible voice.

“I am Margaret Morgan, child. I glimpse you through the ages, for such is the power of my Dark Lord. You have done nothing, and yet you shall suffer. And yet you, too, are chosen.”

Heidi looked past the woman, at her own door. She tried to hear the sound of Steve scratching there, but the hall still seemed absent of all sound apart from Morgan’s soft, oddly soothing voice.

“Feel the earth… taste of the air. Hear that?” asked Morgan. She cupped her hand to her ear. Heidi listened, but still heard nothing beyond Morgan’s voice. “The sound of the clouds and the scent of the wind… all becoming one. The whores of the deceivers will gather before us and bleed us a King. You, my beloved sister, are the knife by which we strip the skin of Salem’s daughters.”

As she spoke, smoke began to rise around her. Then flames. Then, though her voice remained soft and did not change at all, she began to burn. Her skin reddened and then began to boil and crackle, then blacken.

“All will know the sister’s pain…,” she said to Heidi. Slowly, her voice became more broken, more labored, and she began to hesitate between the words, her eyes filling with anguish. “My pain… the pain of feeling flesh cooking within your body… They will feel what I felt… They will…”

But Margaret Morgan couldn’t go on. Her hair caught fire, and her face as well. She seemed to want to speak again, seemed to be struggling to say more. But when she managed to open her mouth again, her head engulfed in flames, it was only to let out a terrible scream.

Chapter Twenty-one

She sat straight up, gasping for breath. Where was she? In the hallway, watching that woman catch flame? No, she was in her bedroom, in bed, the TV still on, the Mafia hit man on the screen. She must have dozed off and then stumbled into some sort of bad dream.

But she could still see, in one corner of her mind, the red light illuminating the room, could still almost smell the burning flesh in her nostrils. That was fucked-up, a woman going up in flames like that, so suddenly. On the one hand, she could recognize that it must have been a dream, that it hadn’t happened. On the other hand, though, it still felt so real that it was hard to believe it hadn’t happened.

She sat there for a moment, her heart beating hard, and then she groped around until she found the lamp on the bedside table. She clicked it on. She kicked back the covers and examined her arms and legs, looking for marks from the attack, but there was nothing there. Of course there’s nothing, she told herself again. It was only a dream. But still she kept touching her body, looking for marks or cuts. She could feel them there, gashes and abrasions on her skin, even though they weren’t visible. Like they were there psychically even if physically there was nothing.

She shook her head. What was wrong with her? Was she going to start having bad dreams now? Wasn’t her life tough enough as it was? What had happened to the old days when she hadn’t had to worry about anything, back before her life got complicated?

Her mind wandered a little, her eyes returning to the screen.

“What did you want them to think as they died?” asked the interviewer from off-camera.

“Nothing,” said the hit man, whose face was covered by a sack. “I just wanted them to see my face. I wanted them to realize I was Death.”

Fuck , she said. No wonder I’m having bad dreams.

And then suddenly she saw it, two eyes glowing in the darkness below her. She almost screamed before she realized it was just Steve.

“You scared me, buddy,” she said, her heart thumping again. “And just when I was starting to calm down. Go lay down.” But then, before he could, she reached out to pet him. He pressed up against the side of the bed and bent his head to get it at the angle he wanted scratched, just like he always did. It made her feel a little better, having him there with her. And he was calm, too, which was a good sign.

She clicked the TV off and lay back in bed, one hand still idly trailing along her dog’s back.

How was she supposed to read it, this dream? She still felt like there should be marks on her body, cuts and scratches and even gashes. But there was nothing. She took a deep breath, trying to calm down. And what had been up with apartment number five in her dream? What had been in there? What was it exactly that had attacked her? Something not human, though it had been human once. Or no, there were two of them; maybe they weren’t the same thing. Undead or ghouls or God knows what.

But what was she talking about? They weren’t real, after all. It was a dream. There was no point trying to think about them as if they were real. She could see how it might happen. Those two black-metal ghouls in the studio earlier in the day didn’t help any, obviously. They’d gotten deeper into her head than she’d realized. Plus, that video of theirs, the “darkness and silence of the abyss,” or whatever they’d called it, that was odd stuff, probably chock-full of subliminal bullshit that was just waiting for her to fall asleep so that it could surface. That must be the explanation. She hadn’t ever had a dream like that before. And she hoped she never would again.