"Just keep heading down the Route," Vicki instructed. "I'll tell you when to turn."

The night seemed crammed down onto the road; the mangy treeline on either side funneled them through each winding bend. Every so often the headlights caught the glimmers of possum eyes in the woods, which reflected red and reminded him all-too-keenly of the Creekers' crimson stare. "Tell me about the House," he said. "What, it's just a wh.o.r.ehouse?"

Vicki smiled without humor. "Sure, sometimes it's a wh.o.r.ehouse. And sometimes it's a slaughterhouse."

She's high, Phil dismissed. "Come on, tell me something I can use."

"The girls at Sallee's, most of the time they'd just turn their tricks in the parking lot, in cars and trucks. But sometimes, if there was a high-paying john, or one of Cody's friends wanted a girl, he'd let her take the trick back to the House. And then there were other nights..."

The rest of the words seemed to drift out the window.

"What?" Phil asked testily. "Other nights, what?"

"Cody would pick certain victims-"

"What do you mean, certain victims?"

"Drug dealers mostly, from the surrounding towns, the kind of guys n.o.body asks questions about when they disappear. And if anybody did file a missing persons report, Mullins would bury it, or stonewall the county cops. That was part of Cody's deal with Mullins-Mullins took a cut to throw the county off track about any bodies that were found. The other part of the deal was Mullins let Cody run hookers out of Sallee's as a lure."

"A lure?"

"Yeah, like I was just saying. A john would buy a girl at the club, then she'd take him back to the house. But that's where the trick ended."

Phil glanced at her. "I don't follow."

"Cody would have some Creekers waiting, then they'd overpower the john and sacrifice him to Ona."

Phil still couldn't believe this, but then he couldn't deny how well the pieces fit. All those murder victims found. All drug dealers from nearby towns. All regulars at Sallee's.

All skinned.

Then another word emerged into his head: Skeet-inner, he thought. Then: Skin-eater "Turn here," Vicki told him.

Phil slowed and steered the cruiser onto a road that was little more than a rutted path twisting up into the woods. Like skeletal fingertips, the ends of branches reached out and scratched deeply into the cruiser's paint. Mullins won't complain, not now, Phil reminded himself. The sound, as they traveled farther up, was worse than nails on slate. And the cruiser's wheels rocked over the road's ruts so much that Phil's teeth began chattering.

Several more turns onto even narrower roads took them into a no-man's land of vines, brush, and hugely knotted trees. They pa.s.sed rotting timberfalls; foxfire glowed green on enslimed logs; networks of spiderwebs glistened between drooping bows. The hot air smelled sweetly putrid.

All these roads, all these turns. Christ, no wonder I couldn't remember the way. The woods were a labyrinth now, the road a juddering maze to nowhere.

But then another road opened to moonlight. An unkempt field, high with dying gra.s.s and weeds, swept to their left. And to their right- Phil recognized the hill, which rose upward against the forestbelt.

And there it stood, before the hundred-foot oaks and bare in the moonlight, the abode of his worst nightmare.

The House, he simply thought.

His eyes felt glued to it.

It had changed little from what his memory offered: graying whitewash, narrow windows, a slightly sagging roof. Decrepit. Worn down by the weight of age but somehow still standing.

"Turn off your lights!" Vicki whispered.

Phil cursed himself, then quickly switched them off and cut the engine. Suddenly the air was alive with throbbing nightsounds, gently deafening, gracefully chaotic. The heat bore down, seemed to press against his face.

Something was calling him, his past perhaps, or the fears he'd kept buried for the last twenty-five years. Something was in there. Right this instant. He wasn't sure what, but somehow that didn't even matter. A demon, or a cult, or just a bunch of crazy inbreds-it was more than any of that. Something powerful, and something equally insane.

Waiting for him.

He grabbed the Remington pump, then stuffed a second pistol into his pants. The third he gave to Vicki. "Wait here."

"No way!" she objected. "You're crazy if you think I'm going to sit here by myself."

"All right, then, come on, but stay behind me and keep quiet."

They both got out. Phil, feeling like a vagabond mercenary, wiped sweat off his brow and stuffed loose ammo into his pockets. Then he clipped a flashlight to his belt and motioned Vicki to follow.

A dirt path wound around some trees up the hill; suddenly the moonlight blared at them. Perfect targets for these hayseeds, he realized. Some Creeker with a long rifle is probably scoping us right now. He leaned low and quickened his pace with Vicki in tow, moving in a rough zigzag. Sweat drenched them both when they got to the top of the moonlit hill. They ducked by the side of the house.

Phil leaned against cracked siding, staring down the hill at nothing. This is suicide, came the bald and very sudden thought. We don't stand a chance, we won't make it ten feet past the front door. I'm gonna wind up getting us both killed...

Vicki's hand touched his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

There are probably fifty Creekers in there...

"Phil?"

Phil turned slightly; his stare lost all focus. You must be out of your mind. Take Vicki, get back in the car, and drive away. Go somewhere, anywhere. Start again, and live...

Just as he considered throwing in the towel and abandoning this madness, a high scream from one of the upper windows shrilled into the night- Susan's scream.

They're torturing her, they're tearing her apart- "Come on," he said. "We're going in now."

Lightly but quickly, he crept around to the front and mounted the wood steps to the porch. All the windows were vaguely dark, but he detected the faintest fluttering orange light from within. Candles and oil lamps, he realized. No electricity. "Anything that moves," he whispered to Vicki, "shoot it."

Shotgun at the ready, he stepped to face the front door, then paused. The strange bra.s.s knocker-a blank face bereft of features save for eyes-stared back at him. He remembered it, from all those years ago. A face from his past, beckoning him now. But there was another face from his past, too, wasn't there? Natter's face- And that was one face Phil couldn't wait to have in his sights.

The door stood slightly ajar, and it creaked appropriately when he pushed it open and aimed the Remington. Several candles flickered; it took Phil a moment for his eyes to adjust, then another moment to digest what he was seeing...

"Good G.o.d," he murmured.

There were indeed Creekers waiting for them. Several waited right here in the foyer. But none of them were armed.

And none of them were alive.

Five or six of them lay in a heap on the threadbare carpet which was now just a sponge of wet blood. Knives lay on the floor too, having recently fallen from limp hands. Their swollen heads hung off their necks at impossible angles to show grisly gashes cut deep across their throats...

They all killed themselves, Phil realized.

Vicki gasped behind him. Phil stepped in. He spotted more bodies lying in the halls to either side, all pale in death, all throat-cut. What in G.o.d's name... Each room off the hallways, too, were now death chambers. And when he'd finished checking all of the rooms on the first floor, he realized there must be over thirty dead Creekers total. All suicides.

It was hard to fathom so many dead bodies at once. Phil felt winded, and Vicki looked like she was about to pa.s.s out. "Come on, we gotta check the next floor," he said.

The stairs were a slow waterfall of blood, and once they got to the second-floor landing, they saw more piles of bodies, more slashed throats, more dead-staring crimson eyes and twisted death-grins. "Why are they doing this?" he muttered to himself.

"I told you, they'll do anything for Cody," Vicki whispered. "Suicide is the ultimate homage to their G.o.d..."

He stood in ragged shock in the hall. More candles flickered about the heaps of disfigured and swollenheaded bodies. Homage? Phil thought. More like madness, sheer and total madness.

"Mannona!" a voice shrieked. A figure wheeled out of the dark, a Creeker. Phil brought the shotgun to bear and fired. Half of the Creeker's head flew away in chunks. "Onnamann!" shouted another flawed voice, and then another Creeker, with a bivalved head, limped quickly out of the flickering darkness. Phil fired again. The report caught the inbred square in the chest and carried him halfway down the hall. Then- Holy s.h.i.t!

Every door in the hall flew open, and a legion of Creekers converged on them. Vicki fired ineptly behind him, screaming, as Phil emptied the shotgun into the approaching ma.s.s. Bodies fell only to be replaced by more. Then Phil whipped out his two pistols, pinpointing and dropping targets one after another in a hail of concussion and muzzleflash. He managed to reload twice in the melee, firing repeatedly, the guns bucking in his hands, and more inbreds fell like hinged ducks in a shooting gallery. When he was done, a lone overalled Creeker with a cleft face grinned at him, raised his arms, and said, "Mannona!"

Then he lunged.

Phil's final shot caught the marauder in the eye and dropped him.

Gunsmoke filled the hall like tear gas. Now a deadfall of bodies lay at his feet. I just killed twenty or thirty people, he realized, but by now the shock had worn away, to be replaced by some stoical kind of complacency. None of the Creekers had been armed, yet they'd attacked anyway. Again, it didn't make sense. They'd willingly, even gleefully, lunged to their deaths.

More proof of Natter's evil.

"Where is he?" he asked, tasting cordite. "Where's Natter? He's upstairs, isn't he?"

Vicki, blood-spattered and gore-flecked, nodded. "In the upper room," she said.

Natter had gone to all this trouble to get him here, and had sacrificed all these people, but-Why? Phil asked himself. He had to know now, no matter what the risk. He reached into his pocket for more bullets but found none. He didn't even care. He took Vicki's hand, stepping over bodies, and made for the next flight of steps.

Then, not in his ears but in his head, Natter's voice grated like stones.

Yes! Up here, little boy...

The narrow stairs creaked underfoot. The heat grew stifling, but Phil was oblivious. He felt oblivious to everything now, to blood, to violence, to killing. He was cauterized, immune. He didn't know what he was walking into, and he didn't care.

The memories hovered. He walked directly to the door at the end of the cramped hallway. Opened it. Stepped in.

Only moonlight lit the room, from the open shutters. Four black corners and a block of tinseled light.

I told you we'd see you again someday, he heard in his head.

Phil glanced at each of the room's stygian corners.

Yes, little boy, we've been waiting...

"Where's Susan!" he erupted. "If she's dead, I burn this whole place to the ground and all you ugly f.u.c.kers with it!"

This invective was answered with a low chuckle. Not many of us left to burn, hmm? You're quite handy with a gun.

"You killed those people, Natter!" Phil railed. "You ordered them to kill themselves! You sent them to their deaths."

No, rather, I sent them to paradise. The time has come; we've all suffered long enough. They are in paradise now, which is where they deserve to be. Tonight our travails are at an end. Tonight our curse is lifted. Tonight we start anew.

The darkness, now, seemed to coagulate; Phil felt he was standing in a grotto with the moon, like a spotlight, casting an aura about him.

Welcome home, the voice croaked.

"This is a h.e.l.l house, it isn't my home."

Oh, but it is. We've waited a long time for your return.

"What do you want?"

You.

"But you had me earlier in the parking lot at the club. Why didn't you take me then?"

Because there were still a few things you needed to remember, weren't there? Hmm?

The dream, he realized. The final part of my childhood memory. He gazed c.o.c.keyed into the dark. The last piece of the puzzle. "You can't know when and what I'm going to dream," he protested.

I know lots of things about you, Phil.

Because I'm your father.

"Bulls.h.i.t."

Think about it, son.

He did then. The darkness focused. Orphaned as an infant. Raised by an "aunt." Could it be possible?

"But I'm not a Creeker," he said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I'm-"

You're what?

Phil's mouth opened, but no words came out.

You're perfect.

"We're both perfect, Phil."

But it wasn't Natter who'd said it. He recognized the voice at once.

"Susan?" he said, squinting.

Moving very slowly, Susan emerged from the dark. But she was fully dressed, smiling softly.

Unhurt.

"I thought-"

"That they were torturing me, raping me, killing me?" she finished. "If you didn't think I was in danger, then you never would've come."