The Chosen

^{CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR}

“It’s all relative, Ms. Abbot. It’s all the same in a way, isn’t it? Think about that.”

Flecks of gore began to dry on Vera’s face as she numbly stared back at Feldspar.

“We’re all servants, are we not?” he suggested. “You are, I am, only to different degrees. All of life is experience, as they say. The same applies to infinity.”

In silence, Vera’s eyes darted about for a weapon. Feldspar had set the big revolver beside one of the Jenn-Air ranges, far out of her reach, and just as out of reach now as the cutlery rack. But what could she be thinking of anyway? She’d seen how useless the knife had been on Kyle; certainly it would be even less effective on Feldspar, who was obviously the core of power in this place.

Unless—

His amethyst, she reckoned.

She remembered what she’d read in the book, that amethyst was their protection. And Kyle had been destroyed only after Feldspar had removed the amethyst pendant. And…

Feldspar wears one too. In fact he always had, since the first night she’d seen him.

And that same amethyst sparkled at her now from the ornate pinky ring on Feldspar’s hand…

“Kyle said I was set up,” she told him. She needed to divert him, she needed to keep him talking and distracted. “How?”

“I should think it would be obvious to you by this point,” Feldspar replied. “I needed someone very badly to run the restaurant, and when I found out about you, I knew that you were the one. I also knew you’d be reluctant to leave your fiancé, so I simply made certain arrangements.”

Vera’s eyes thinned. “What kind of…arrangements?”

Feldspar smiled, as if at a naive toddler. “I instructed the Zyramon, via her own sense of creativity, to effect a situation that would induce you to leave your lover.”

“The Zyramon,” Vera repeated dreamily. She’d read about this person in the book. “It said she was a—”

“She’s a synoec, a hermaphrodite. The beautiful woman with red hair? Surely you’ve not forgotten your encounter with her. I believe she engaged the services of a particularly seamy prostitute to lend assistance. They drugged your beloved fiancé, seduced him, and made sure that you would have the opportunity to bear witness.”

Vera’s mind seemed to swim suddenly in obscure, dark clouds. Paul wasn’t lying. It was all true…

“A fine ploy that proved to be quite effective, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Abbot? But I had no choice. You were the one, and I was determined to have you regardless of the means.” Feldspar’s brazen bald head shined like a shellacked orb. “And as for the matter of finances, I should also think that that, too, would by now be more than apparent. Our—shall we say—enterprise has access to unlimited financial resources. And I suspect you can guess from whence these resources originate.”

Vera felt sick, her mind still aswarm in the tarn of confusions and impossibilities…

“And we have access to far more resources than mere financial ones,” Feldspar went on, unconsciously eyeing his amethyst ring. “Power, protection, knowledge. And an array of intricacies.”

“Intricacies?”

“Coercions, instigations, influences,” he defined. “Your dreams provide a sound example.”

Merely the word—dream—set her mind off yet again. What would Feldspar know of her dreams, her fantasies? The Hands, she grimly remembered. And the lewd nightmare that always followed. The faceless night-suitor violating her in ways she’d never imagined…

“It was me,” Feldspar said.

Her glare turned to stone.

“I’m very…fond of you, Ms. Abbot,” he confessed. “I’ve always been. Our lord purveys certain provisions—certain elixirs, emulsions, and ointments—which serve our needs well, which make people exceedingly desirous. We enhance things with it, our liquor, our food, massage oils, etc.”

This revelation unreeled in her head like a roll of ribbon tossed off a precipice. Drugs, she realized. Like the drugs that hideous redhead had spiked Paul’s drinks with. Feldspar put the same drugs in my drink. Drugs which made her confuse reality with fantasy, which made her want things she’d never really wanted: rape, sadism, masochism. And when she thought back further, it made even more sense. The only nights she hadn’t had the fantasy of The Hands were nights she hadn’t drunk any of the Grand Marnier Feldspar had given her, or taken a bath with the lavish bath oils. And the night Kyle had given her the back rub at the pool—He used massage oil…

So they’d drugged her, to be more responsive. None of it had been a dream at all. Every night Feldspar had been secreting into her room, to rape her…

“And I know what you may be thinking,” the squat, frocked man went on. “But it was all bound to one very important consideration.’’

“What!” she spat.

“I love you.”

Her rage roiled, but she knew she mustn’t show it. She must not let herself break. She needed to think, didn’t she? She needed to calculate—

The sick motherfucker…

—a way to destroy him.

And the cutlery rack wasn’t that far away.

She knew what she must do.…

Keep talking, keep distracting him.

“And The Inn itself,” she said. “I don’t understand. None of it makes sense. All the money you pumped into the place and it seemed from the start that you wanted it to fail.”

“Of course I did,” he answered. “We needed a sufficient cover.”

“A cover? What are you talking about?”

“We needed camouflage. A fine restaurant backed by a lucrative holding company provided that. But we couldn’t have it become too successful, could we? We couldn’t have too many people coming here. After all, they might take note of our real services. You do know, Ms. Abbot, why we’re really here, don’t you?”

Again she remembered the book. Magwyth. Servant of Demons. Banished to earth as penance, to provide gluttonies for Satan’s hirelings.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“Then likewise you can see our need to do things the way we did. The Inn needed to provide a legitimate, expensive restaurant. Yet on the other hand it had to fail, to keep out an influx of local residents. No one makes queries when the bills are paid and the books are in order, Ms. Abbot. We chose The Inn’s remote location deliberately, for the same reason. And as for The Inn’s checkered past, the same reason too.”

Now Vera understood. “And you chose me, a legitimate restaurant manager, to cover for you without even knowing it.”

“That’s…correct, Ms. Abbot,” Feldspar admitted. “And I hope you will forgive me. In time, I’m sure that you will, when you fully realize what I can offer you ultimately.”

Vera sneered. “And what’s that?”

“Eons, Ms. Abbot. I can offer you eons. We’re both alike, you and I. We are both servants, in a sense.” His eyes pricked into her. “Love me, Vera, and serve with me. And I will give you anything you’ve ever wanted and a million times more. Forever.”

She knew what he was implying, the same thing he’d so discreetly implied all along. She knew there was only one way out:

“All right,” she said.

The shiny face peered back at her, skeptically hopeful. Was he actually shaking, he was so nervous?

“Do you think—” he faltered. “Do you think you could love me?”

“Yes,” she said.

He expression blanked. “Then prove it.”

Vera approached him, willingly, and with desire. She didn’t flinch at all when she noted a white marinade bucket on the cold line—a marinate bucket containing Dan B.’s head.

“Make me immortal and I’ll love you forever,” she whispered, and with that confession she wrapped her arms around Feldspar and kissed him on the mouth—an eternal mouth—a mouth that had reveled in the utterance of blasphemies for a thousand years. She kissed that mouth with all the voracity and passion that she’d ever kissed anyone in her life…

Feldspar returned the kiss. He began to weep.

“Make love to me,” she whispered. “Just like you did all those other nights. Here. Right here.”

Vera sat upon the service line, and with no hesitation whatever she pulled up her nightgown to bare her sex.

“Now,” she breathed.

Feldspar, teary-eyed and in bliss, stepped up between her spread thighs. He placed one hand down, and with the other began to unsash his frock. Between the sackcloth divide, his erection sprouted: a pale and hideous tuber with dark blue veins, pulsing upward.

Vera spread her legs further, to offer herself as fully as any woman could…

“My love,” he whispered and closed his eyes.

Instantaneously her hand snapped up, plucked the shiny rib cleaver from the cutlery rack and brought it down on Feldspar’s hand, which remained opened on the wood butcher block beside the range—

chunk!

His scream sounded disappointingly human, and when he raised his hand, backing away, Vera saw with great satisfaction that three of his fingers remained on the butcher block, his ring finger among them, the finger that sported the big, faceted amethyst…

She swung the cleaver in a lateral arc. It’s bright blade sunk inches into Feldspar’s stout neck, releasing a spray of brackish, black blood. He howled further, shuddering.

And with all her might, Vera brought the cleaver down with both hands—

swack!

—into the center of his bald forehead.

He teetered back, arms reeling. The cleaver’s formidable blade had bitten into Feldspar’s brain no less than three inches, the great cranial fissure oozing the midnight blood.

Then he collapsed.

Vera squealed. I did it! I did it! I—

Then her squeals of victory corroded.

Feldspar got up.

The look on his halved face was not one of rage or betrayal or anger. It was a look of wounding, or heartfelt hurt.

He removed the cleaver from his head and tossed it aside. Then, his other hand—the hand whose fingers Vera had so expertly chopped off—he turned over and looked at.

She’d separated him from his power, from the amethyst, and had buried a Sheffield meat cleaver into his head to boot, but he didn’t even seem to care.

“Kyle was just an acolyte, a weakling,” Feldspar said with a vast sadness in his voice. “My power here—my fortitude—comes from a far greater source.”

Vera screamed, a reasonable thing to do under these newfound circumstances. Feldspar’s good hand snapped to her throat. He raised her up fully off her feet, then threw her down. Her head smacked the tile floor, her vision churned, then darkened. She knew she was passing out.

And she also knew what was going to happen next.

Just…let me…die first…

He hauled up her gown, spat on her sex. His hand clamped again to her throat as he bared himself. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you now, Ms. Abbot. But first…”

The bulbed, nearly white end of the thing nudged her sex, began to enter…

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he bellowed.

Perhaps Vera really was dying, or maybe she was hallucinating. But in the furthest recess of what remained of her consciousness, she thought she heard something.

It reminded her of a dream-sound, a reverberation from a nightmare:

chink! chink! chink!

What was it?

Feldspar struggled shambling to his feet, his eyes for some reason so large that they appeared to be on the brink of launching from their sockets. His face contorted, and his ears—

Vera, in her daze, squinted.

There’s blood coming out of his ears…

chink! chink! chink!

With each chink! Feldspar seemed to buckle. Still issuing the maleficent howl, he staggered out of the kitchen…

To the atrium, Vera deduced.

She crawled at first, then managed to rise to her bare feet. She blundered out of the kitchen, into the black restaurant, each succeeding chink! goading her on.

When he made it to the atrium, she knew she’d been right.

The Inn’s grand front doors stood open.

chink! chink! chink!

Vera eventually made it to the floodlit front cul-de-sac. And what she saw was this:

Feldspar shuddering, on his knees…

And a silhouetted figure wielding what appeared to be a sledgehammer up at the front door’s transom…

Vera felt drunk, insane, and unreal all at the same time.

She recognized the hammer-wielding figure…

“Paul!” she shrieked.

chink! chink! chink!

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Feldspar screamed louder.

And Vera screamed again herself: “Paul!”

He held the sledge at its downswing, sweating, maniacal, ugly. His hair was sticking up, and he grimaced at her, then shouted in reply: “Get out of here!”

“But—Paul! I—”

“GET THE FUCK OUT, GODDAMN IT! GET OUT!”

Tears flowed, her throat swelled shut—

chink! chink! chink!

Vera gulped, swallowed tears—

“GET THE GODDAMN FUCKING HELL OUT OF HERE, GODDAMN YOU!” Paul shouted one last time.

Then:

chink! chink! chink!

Vera turned around, went back into The Inn, and began to run…

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