Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

She felt a little cold. She realized the bedroom window was open, a light breeze ruffling the curtain. Had she left it open? She couldn’t remember having done so, and it was hardly the right time of year for it, considering how cold she was, but who knows. She’d been drinking. Maybe she’d been flushed when she went to bed. She sighed and stood up to go shut it.

As she was about to slide it closed, she noticed across the street a fat man standing just inside his own window, facing slightly to the side, messing with something just out of sight. He was naked, his belly and thighs spilling out to hide his privates. Somehow that looked more obscene to her than if his cock had been visible. There was something wrong with him: he had a clear plastic mask strapped over his face. She followed the tube leading off it back to an oxygen tank. Ugh , she thought. And then he turned toward the window and looked straight at her. Caught off guard, she met his gaze. For a moment they just stared at one another, and then he lifted up a hand that seemed strangely red, as if stained with blood, and slammed a set of iron shutters closed.

Excuse you , she thought. Didn’t hurt to look, did it? Or maybe it did a little, if that guy was what you had to look at.

She was starting to feel a little better. She went back to the bed and crawled onto it, lying facedown. Turning out the light and closing her eyes, she tried to get back to sleep.

When the light was on, when she had walked through the room, when she had looked around, it simply wasn’t there. Or if it was there, she somehow couldn’t see it. Somehow looked right through it. Would someone else coming into the room have seen it, or when the light was on was it simply not there?

But there in the dark above her something slowly coalesced. At first it was little more than an unsteadiness in the air; then it became a blur, then, slowly, more and more substantial. It took on form. A line of deeper darkness running down from the ceiling became, slowly, the links of a greased iron chain. At the end of it hung something that at first seemed solid but then separated into gaps and bars, becoming a wrought-iron cage. It was empty, but the bars were stained with blood and stuck with feathers and the door did not latch. It swung slowly back and forth, creaking. But rather than slowing and stopping, it swung more and more regularly. It seemed propelled by an unseen hand, the hand soothing and coaxing some unseen or invisible thing in the cage.

Beneath it, oblivious, Heidi moaned and struggled and tried to sleep.

Tuesday

Chapter Twenty-two

Though broken into apartments, there was nothing on the outside to reveal the house to be anything but a single-family home. It had been painted a deep indigo typical of the colonial period, one of the colors approved by the Salem historical society. Unlike most rentals, the tiny lawn was neat and tidy, not a leaf in it. A small knee-high fence ran around the yard, wrought-iron bars with spikes at the end of them, maybe enough to keep a dog in if it was a small dog, but little more. The porch, too, had been carefully swept, and the walkway had been scrubbed until the cement almost glowed.

Only once you went inside and saw the doors with names on them did it became clear it wasn’t a single-family dwelling. There was a door just inside the front door with the name Savage on it, and a table covered with mail split into three stacks. A staircase wound upward to the second floor and another door, another name on it. A narrower staircase climbed farther, to a shorter, smaller door that led to a converted attic.

Inside this last door, a man with slicked-back white hair paced through his living room. He was old, near seventy, but thin and spry. He was dressed in a simple black suit, old but in good condition. He stopped before a full-length mirror beside the door and began fixing his tie. He regarded himself with a sour look.

“What the hell’s wrong with my hair today?” he asked. He waited for a response and when none came he continued. “Should I shave?” When there was still no response, he half turned from the mirror. “Alice?” he said.

Alice Matthias, a silver-haired woman with perfect bone structure, stepped nearer and gently pulled his hands away from his tie. “You’re just making it worse, dear,” she said. When his hands began to move back to it, she said, “Francis, let me do it.” She undid the tie and then smoothed the ends out, began tying it again. Francis fidgeted a little but let her do it.

“There, Francis,” she said. “I think that looks good, don’t you?” She patted him softly on the chest.

“What about the hair?” he asked.

Alice gave him a scolding look. “You do realize that it’s radio,” she said. “Nobody’s going to see how you look.”

“I know,” said Francis. “I want to…” He hesitated, and then admitted, “I don’t know what I want.”

Alice patted his chest again. “Don’t be so nervous,” she said. “You’ll do fine.”

Fine , thought Francis. I want to do better than just fine. And why did I ever agree to do this in the first place? He’d been feeling good when the guy from the station had suggested it—after all, he was at a bookstore and signing a bunch of his books: who wouldn’t feel good about that? But then he’d made the mistake of listening to the program last night and realized that the Big H team wasn’t going to exactly be scintillating talk and conversation. He’d be lucky if they’d even read his book. No, he’d be lucky if they’d even read a chapter of his book. And last night there’d been an interview with some odd Satanic rock group. It was demeaning to follow on the heels of something like that.

“I’m a little nervous,” he admitted as Alice continued to rub his shoulder. “I can’t believe I let myself get talked into these things. I hate things like this.”

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Calm down,” she said. “It will be fun and you yourself were just complaining.” She pulled back and did her imitation of him—he hated when she did that, but if he was honest with himself he had to admit she was pretty good at it: “I need a way to sell more books, Alice. I need to get the word out.”

Well, he had said that, and he did need it. His book was good—he knew it, really solid historical writing. But it just wasn’t getting into the right hands. But there was no way the Big H team and their listeners were the right hands.

“I don’t sound like that,” he lied. “I didn’t say that.”

“Whatever you say,” said Alice. “Oh, make sure you get some passes to the film. I want to see it.”

“What film?”

“You’ve already forgotten? Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder .”

“You really want to see that?” he asked. “I thought you were joking. It’s undignified. Alice, you know how I feel about those historically inaccurate portrayals of—”

She cut him off with a look. “Be a dear and get me my passes,” she said.

“I’m not going to ask them for—”

“Just do what the wife says and nobody gets hurt,” she said.

Francis sighed, nodded. “Yes, dear,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-three

A few hours later and he was there. Yes, Alice had been right; there was no reason to dress up. None of the Big H team were wearing suits—one of the men hadn’t managed to find a shirt with buttons and seemed to be wearing a promotional T-shirt, a sparkly gold thing advertising a band named Mattress. What kind of name was that for a band? The fellow was also wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses—indoors! What was the point of that? And he had a beard that would have made Santa Claus jealous. The other, the one named Herman—or wait, that was confusing too because they both were named Herman it turned out, but he was supposed to call the other Herman something else. What was it? White Herman? Were they pulling his leg? What kind of a name was that? Anyway, this other Herman, the African American guy, he was dressed like an extra from a seventies Blaxploitation film, was even wearing a purple pimp’s shirt with gold buttons. Fool’s gold, probably. Francis didn’t know quite how to take it. Had Herman been dressing that way since the seventies or was it just some sort of hip thing that was so gauche that it had become fashionable again? The third one, the woman named Heidi, looked all right, though a little bedraggled, like she’d just gotten out of bed despite how late in the day it was. She had dark circles under her eyes and didn’t look like she’d slept much, but she seemed the nicest of the three. The most normal anyway.