HE AWOKE WITH A START. HE WAS SWEATING. THE SHEETS were damp and his hands were trembling. Sara, he said. Sara. But when he looked at the bed next to him she was not there and he remembered she never would be again.
He swung his feet out of bed and put them on the floor. The heeler was asleep at the foot of the bed and did not move. Fielding went to the bathroom for a drink of water. He drank a glass and then another. He looked at his reflection in the mirror. There was a little rain tapping on the glass. He knew he should go back to bed but the haunted world of that dream had left him wary. So he put on his robe and went downstairs and made some coffee.
The clock on the wall read 3:49. The coffee maker was starting to bubble. He stood looking through the big windows out at the darkness. Nothing to see there but looked anyway. Kept looking until the coffee was done. He went to the cupboard and took down a mug. That’s when he remembered the videotape he’d taken from the Fairlane. A sinking feeling came over him. Its very existence frightened him. He put down the mug and went to the front door and pulled on his boots and dressed in his slicker and put on his hat and went out into the rain. He crossed the drive toward the truck. The dirt of the drive had turned to mud. His boots made sucking sounds as they pulled free. He opened the door of the truck. Right where he had left it after Batey dropped him off. The danger it seemed to possess. Like coming across a sleeping pit viper.
Back in the house he stood looking at it while his coffee steamed in the air. Going this far, he knew, had already started it. It was like nudging a boulder from a mountain. It would only stop when it reached the very bottom.
He took the tape into the living room and slid it into the VCR and turned on the television. An awful unsettled feeling washed over him. He hit the play button. A static line fell down the screen like a theater curtain. There was no sound to it. At first Fielding didn’t know what he was looking at. His heart was pounding against his ribs. It was like it wanted to flee his body. To have no part in this.
The video opened on a dark room. Nothing but darkness. So black anyone watching might make the mistake of checking the VCR to confirm the video was even playing. Then came the switch of a breaker and there she was. The pale subject. Drugged looking and naked, but somehow alert. Her head turned about like it was chasing a hummingbird. She’d been decorated with feathers and what looked like twigs of sagebrush done up in her hair. A halo on her head. The same kind he had seen on Summers. Her eyes were painted black. Like a kind of mask. She appeared to be alone in the room. There was a long close-up of her breasts, like some obscene art house film. The same kind of shot between her legs, the skin smooth and hairless. The last close-up was of her face. She was crying and the tears streamed through the black paint and the tears mixed with the paint and ran in black rivulets down her face.
There was a smash cut to an abandoned factory. All the large boilers and bent and twisting pipes looked to have been out of use for years. In the middle of the wide concrete floor was a wooden table and on the table was the same naked girl. Fielding felt his palms go slick with sweat. His stomach balled up. Everything was humming. The camera closed in on her. She was tied to the table and she had a piece of black cloth tied around her eyes. The camera backed up and from the dark voids of the factory a parade of six figures emerged. They were holding candles and the votive flames seemed suspended of their own volition. The men too were also naked but their faces were hidden in grotesque carnival masks painted wildly like something out of Dante. They came and surrounded the table like acolytes. They stood motionless. Some fat, some skinny. The girl on the table writhed sluggishly. The flames of the candles leapt about like moths.
Another smash cut to the girl’s tortured face. All the sound had been removed and she was crying out in silence. Then one by one each of the men moved toward her. They tilted their candles to spill the hot wax over her isabelline skin and then one by one they took their turns.
When the last of them had stepped away a towering figure came forward. The mask he wore was made out of some kind of animal skin. Some stiff mangy hair coming off the chin like a billy goat. A broad set of antlers with feathers and sage dangling like distorted ornaments. Holes cut for eyes, but no mouth. Just the mindless facade of a nightmare that plagues a soul’s empty corners from the moment a soul is.
The antlered one approached her. He stood behind her. Her supine head level with his waist. He removed the blindfold. In a distinct moment of awe the girl looked up and did not cry. She did not scream. Only for a moment she went totally still. Completely calm. As if in recognition. As if in awakening. Her eyes gleamed with a crazed light as though the flames of every votive candle in that room were captured within her black pupils. And for a moment it was not fear in her eyes but salvation.
But there was no salvation and this was no awakening. This was the first dimming of the eyelids’ closing that shuts out all light to come. A darkness that would be forever. Infinite. And with one hand the man held the girl’s chin. Then Fielding cried out as the blade winked in the candlelight and erupted a thin crescent across her throat and the black blood pumped onto the table, to wash over the wood like wine and spill finally to the cold floor. Her eyes glazed over and eventually went flat. And one by one each man came to the table and buried his face into her throat.