Edward Lee - The Chosen

If it’s not an exit… maybe it’s an entrance…

It made as much sense as anything could at this moment, before this bizarre sewer pipe in freezing cold. Paul walked toward the cement mouth of the pipe, then stopped—

Shit!

—then ducked back around the side of the embankment.

A sound had issued from the pipe, he felt sure of it.

Footsteps.

And a moment later, he knew he hadn’t been hearing things. He hunkered down, one eye peeking beyond his cover…

A figure emerged from the exit or entrance or whatever it was.

Bags of some sort seemed slung across the figure’s back. The figure was bald, Paul saw in the dim light, though he appeared youthful, strong, a spring in the step. But what struck Paul even more immediately was that the figure wore only a pair of jeans. No shoes and no shirt, though, in this killer cold. Paul watched, deflecting his breath…

The man disappeared down a thin divide in the trees, then reemerged a minute later, minus the bags he’d been toting. He was whistling. He paused a moment on the pavement, and in that moment Paul noticed something else:

A sparse pendant about the man’s neck, and at its end, laying between well-developed pectorals, hung a shiny, dark-purple gemstone.

Amethyst, Paul suspected, remembering the transom.

Then the shirtless figure reentered the sewer pipe and disappeared.

Who the fuck was that? Paul thought the logical question. Was he The Inn’s garbage man? And why dump garbage back here? There’d be a dumpster, wouldn’t there?

See for yourself.

Paul stepped into the narrow divide between the trees.

A scratch of a trail descended; leafless branches threatened to claw Paul’s face. The footpath wound down further, then opened into a large dell encloaked by trees. Paul noticed steam…

He couldn’t see much, but he could see enough. A faint stench drifted up in the biting cold air. Bags, he realized.

A pit had been dug out of the dell, and the pit was full of large, stuffed, plastic garbage bags. And the two bags nearest the top…wafted steam.

Paul climbed down.

His fingers, like cold prongs of stone, tore open the uppermost bag.

Paul gazed down.

Focused.

Then gasped.

His feet took him briskly back up the narrow, tree-lined trail. His heart raced, and his eyes, even if he closed them, refused to release the image…

The bag he’d torn open had been full of steaming human body parts.

— | — | —

GOING… DOWN…

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Reality check, Vera, she implored herself.

After reading the occult text, she stood in check.

What was she thinking now? What could she possibly be considering? Coincidence, she determined at first. What else could it be?

All the things mentioned in the book she just read, certainly, were seriously coincidental. But…

Consciously, at least, she didn’t think for a minute that any of it could be true.

Demons?

Satanic servitude?

Amethyst, the source of their power?

The only one that really bothered her was the reference to Magwyth, in ancient times, being executed upon a slab of—

Feldspar, she remembered.

Don’t be ridiculous, Vera!

But the dreams she was having, every night nearly, somehow beckoned her.

She could not describe the impulse just then, nor any motivation she could fathom.

Nevertheless, her mind still ticking against her will, she pulled on her robe, paused another stifled moment, then…

She walked out of her bedroom.

««—»»

Skinned skulls. Long arms and legbones clipped at the tendons of their muscle meat. Emptied ribcages and plundered abdominal vaults…

These were the steaming things Paul had glimpsed within the black-green plastic garbage bag.

Back up at the loading dock—or whatever it really was—he prepared to flee but then something flagged him. What? he thought. Initial impulse told him to get the fuck out of there, sprint back to the car, head on down the highway, and find the nearest state police barracks. After all, he knew what he saw.

Or did he?

Shock, sometimes, proved very elusive. He got to thinking. Maybe it wasn’t what it looked like, he suggested to himself. Come on—human body parts? That seemed a bit far-fetched. The eyes were known to play tricks sometimes. It must’ve been a trick, he thought. Suddenly he felt convinced of this.

Or…did he?

The round maw of the sewer pipe seemed to call to him. The shirtless bald man, he remembered, had disappeared into it.

Where’d he go? Paul wondered.

Then a more stolid thought flashed in his head.

Vera’s in there. Somewhere.

Vera…

I still love her, he realized.

And then, with no hesitation whatsoever, Paul Foster did the least logical thing he could do under the circumstances:

He entered the great pipe’s entry and began to follow its dark, damp course up into the ridge, toward The Inn.

Instantly he felt drowning in moist darkness; the concourse of the sewer pipe seemed like a spectral esophagus into which he was being swallowed. Just as he thought he could walk no more, due to the cloying dark, gobbets of light rasped his eye. He knew he was walking upward into the ridge. Eventually he detected the most diminutive illumination. Light, he thought. Yes, it was definitely light…

Paul followed the light.

After what seemed a hundred yards through the bowels of the ridge, the round, cement concourse left him standing in a warm, wanly lit corridor. He heard the faintest humming, like machines far away.

He walked on, eyes flicking back and forth. What if I get caught in here? he wondered. What will they do? Process trespassing charges? He didn’t much care, though. Some unbidden curiosity urged him on. Some query, some dementia.

He wasn’t sure what it could be.

The corridor turned. Doors lined it, on either side. He peeked into one and saw something that looked almost like a cave: rough rock walls lit only by sputtering torches set into sconces. A large bed of pillows lay in the center of the cave-room.

But the room, other than that, was empty.

A dream, he thought when he looked into the next room.

Not men but things fornicating frenetically with two listless women tied down to a similar bed of pillows. Others stood round watching, an eager glint in impossibly huge eyes. A few of these watchers masturbated erections the size of rolling pins…

Yes. It must be a dream.

It had to be.

In the next room a similar scene ensued, only some of the queer-looking spectators seemed to be engrossed with plates of food. Women, however, moaned in unison as still more figures with strangely warped heads steadily performed cunnilingus. Inordinately large tongues, like pink snakes, delved without reluctance into the spread, moist fissures. One figure admitted an entire hand, while its glaze-eyed recipient tossed and turned in heady bliss…

A dream, he thought a second time.

In the next room, a bald woman seemed to be cleaning up, placing large, smudged platters into a plastic bustray. Her pubis was as bald as her head, and large, pert breasts seemed erected on her chest.

There was something—

Something, he slowly thought.

—that seemed uneasily familiar.

Then she turned and looked at him. Recognition widened her eyes.

“Paul!” she acknowledged.

Paul’s sight seemed to droop like warm putty.

“You,” he croaked, and in the same instant of grim recognition he was grabbed from behind, by the throat.