Luther put an ear to Andrew’s heart and listened.
After a moment, Rufus said, “We good?”
Luther grinned.
“If it is beating, I can’t hear it and it won’t be for long.”
Luther started unbuckling one of the wrist restraints but Rufus said, “Just leave him, son. We don’t have time to mess with…where’s Violet?”
Vi was running through a pitchblack corridor, her hands and mouth still duct-taped, praying again for the soul of Andrew Thomas.
She stopped and took five deep breaths through her nose.
The generator was silent now and somewhere in the black maze she heard the Kites coming.
And she was running again—straight into a door.
The way out.
She kicked the door open and moved through into a place of awful-smelling darkness.
The old woman’s voice echoed down the tunnel.
Vi closed the door with her foot, eyes desperate for even a sliver of light.
All around her burgeoned the fetor of death.
Just keep walking. This is the way out.
She walked headfirst into someone’s chest.
The person moved away and she jumped back into someone else.
She shrieked through the tape as the door behind her burst open.
A lantern illuminated the room and what she saw in that firelit semidark brought Vi to her knees.
There were perhaps ten of them, hanging by chains from the ceiling, in various stages of decay, their feet just inches off the floor so they appeared to stand of their own volition.
Why have You sent me to hell?
Though she knew the Kites were standing in the threshold behind her, blocking the only way out, Vi couldn’t resist the impulse to look at the faces all around her.
Some had been there for a long long time and they’d disintegrated into carrion, rags, and bones.
The boy who’d tried to save them dangled in a mangle of damage in a far corner.
The ones she’d bumbled into were still swinging—two men near where she knelt, their clothes and wounds still fresh, heads drooped down, masked in gloom.
She peered up at their faces—wrecked.
One of the men was large and mustached.
The other was thinner, taller, younger, and something fluttered in Vi’s brain.
The duct tape arrested her screams but she managed to bash her head into the stone wall three times before Luther came over and dragged her away.
She’d seen the dead man’s long soft hands, recognized the wristwatch, and she knew the pinstripe button-down, rent by buckshot, because she’d given it to Max for his last birthday.
“That’s a bad girl,” Luther told her. “Don’t you do that. You’re precious. He’s gone, and you’re never going to see him again, so what’s the use in crying?”
Luther knelt down and stroked her cheek.
He took a syringe from his pocket and jammed the needle into her arm.
“You make my insides taste like sugar,” he said. “I’m gonna love you up so much.”
“Guess it’s time,” Rufus said.
Luther lifted Violet in his arms and the Kites walked together out of the hanging room, through the basement corridors, past the electric chair, and up the creaking stairs.
They emerged from the front door into a bible black predawn, Violet asleep now, in the arms of Luther, in the arms of the drug.
And the yellow rind of a moon was sinking into the sound, the live oaks wrenched and gleaming, frost murdering the beach grass, as they piled into the ancient pickup truck and fled their crumbling house of stone.
K I N N A K E E T
65
WHEN I came around, the odor of my death was everywhere: scorched hair, leather and gas, hot copper, cooked flesh.
I was still strapped to the chair, now in total darkness.
So many shades of pain I couldn’t pick the worst.
I strained against the leather.
The left wrist strap must’ve been partially undone because my arm broke free.
I unbuckled my right wrist, and with both hands ripped off the singed and crumbling restraints.
I staggered to my feet, fell back into the chair, stood up again.
My burns raged as I floundered through the darkness, hobbling along as fast as I could, limbs shaking, one arm outstretched to protect my face, the other tracing the stone wall.
It occurred to me that I was dead, wandering through some outlying region of hell, and still I walked on in the dark for what seemed decades, into deadends and black rooms, through corridors that turned back into themselves, all the while the pain mounting.
I leaned over and puked.
Then came the sharpest stab of dread I’d ever known.
It whispered, Welcome to eternity.
Panic eclipsed the pain, my mind beginning to splinter, when I tripped and fell into a staircase.
My frenzy abating.
Gazing up into darkness.
Still no sign of light.
I crawled up the steps, rotten and doddering beneath me.
My head collided with a wall of wood.
I groped for a doorknob.
The door squeaked open and I tumbled into the foyer of the House of Kite, draped in the sulky gray silence of early morning.
Struggling to my feet, I moved on through the narrow hallway into the kitchen, the dead quietude of the house convincing me they’d fled, taken Violet with them.
I glanced at my forearms in the weak dawnlight that spilled through the kitchen window, the undersides blistering and striated with electrical burns. My calves and the crown of my head had been similarly ravaged, all scorched where the electricity had entered and left my body.
There wasn’t a phone in the kitchen and a search of the library and living room turned up nothing.
Through the living room’s gothic windows I saw a gray Impala parked in the front yard.
Limping back into the kitchen, wreathed in a miasma of spoiled flounder, I found the lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table, filled with keys.
I grabbed them all, and disowning the pain, started for the front door, for Violet.
66
I moved like a wavering drunk through the bending beach grass, crumpling finally across the hood of the rusting Impala, winded, stonewalling the pain.
The day had dawned cloudy and freezing, pellets of sleet tinkling on the metal, the sootcolored sound writhing in chop beyond the house of stone.
I climbed behind the wheel of the car, started shoving keys into the ignition. The fourth one turned and the engine hiccupped and revived to a stammering idle.
Shifting into drive, I stepped on the accelerator, the back tires slinging weeds and sand as the car surged between the elegiac live oaks and sped down the dirt road into thicket gloom.
Curtains of dying Spanish moss swept across the windshield, the Impala bumping along through puddles, over washboards that threatened to rattle the car apart.