“You’re the people?” he says when he sees us.
“We are indeed,” says Wells. “I’m Marshal Larson Wells and this is one of my associates.” He doesn’t introduce me. “You just leave everything to us from here on out.”
The guy looks so relieved I think he’s going to cry. Even through his suit, his raincoat, and the rain I can smell his fear sweat.
“I’m Huston Aldridge. The head of the facility. I don’t have to go back inside with you, do I? I don’t want to go back in there,” he says.
“No, sir. You don’t.”
Aldridge nods.
“The board has already decided to close the hospital. There’s no earthly way to make it habitable again.”
“Is your staff out of the building?”
“Staff? What staff? There are the ones on holiday. The rest are in there. No. There’s no one alive inside, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” says Wells with all the sincerity of a Hummer salesman. He wants to ditch this sniveling civilian and get his mitts on the place.
I say, “What kind of security does the place have?”
Wells gives me a look, but lets the question pass.
“Ample. I thought. Not many people in the city know it, but years ago this was a holding facility for prisoners on their way to or from county jail. We kept some of the old gates and cells in place.”
“Sounds homey.”
Wells steps in front of me.
“Do you know how many people are inside?”
“It was a holiday weekend, so, thankfully, the number of staff was low. Some patients who could went home with their families for Christmas. The last count I’m aware of was sixty-six patients plus twenty-four staff.”
Wells nods, keeping up the good-cop routine.
“Right. Any unusual incidents lately? Hirings? Firings?”
“Magic?” I say. “Evidence of a haunting?”
“What?” says Aldridge.
Wells says, “What my associate means is did anyone, patients or staff, see anything unusual, anything they couldn’t explain?”
“Nothing that I know about. It’s usually quiet this time of year. Visits are down. People have other things on their mind.”
“Do we need keys to get around inside?”
Aldridge shakes his head.
“What’s the point? Everything is wide open.”
“Thank you, sir. We’ll be in touch,” says Wells.
Aldridge says, “How did they do it?”
“They?”
“Of course. No one person could have done what’s inside. It would take a large surgical team. More than one, probably. A dozen people working at once.”
“Thank you, Doctor. You understand that the facility will be on total lockdown once we’re inside. Is that all right with you?”
He looks out at the vans in the pouring rain.
“I’m not going back in there,” he says. Then, “Why aren’t the police handling this? Why federal agents?”
“The police have their hands full keeping rubber ducks from blocking the sewers,” I say. “Besides, eighty bodies inside? I don’t think cops can count that high.”
Wells grabs my arm hard enough to leave a mark.
“Go over there and wait by the door.”
I go. Wells and Aldridge shake hands. The doctor glances at me over his shoulder then heads for his car and drives out of there as fast as he can.
Wells comes over, but won’t look at me because maybe he’ll strangle me if he does.
“I wanted you there with your mouth closed because you’re supposed to have a good sense of these things. Was Aldridge telling the truth?”
“If you mean was he scared shitless, yeah. If you mean did he do the deed inside, I doubt it. You don’t think he’s Saint Nick, do you?”
“At this point, I’m open to any possibility.”
Shit.
“No. That guy stank of PTSD. He couldn’t kill anything bigger than a housefly.”
“All right,” he says.
“Why did you want me to read the guy for lies? Don’t you have your own supercharged lie detectors?”
“Yes. I just wanted to hear what you had to say.”
“If I implicated him.”
“Right.”
“Then I’m on your list of suspects.”
“Not necessarily,” says Wells. “Though you do have a history of decapitation.”
“Meaning I’d be in the clear if I shot more people. I’ll have to remember that.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“You’re just open to possibilities.”
“I want this chaos ended,” he says. Without turning around, he waves his arm and the side doors on all three vans slide open. Vigil agents in transparent raincoats pile out and start unpacking gear. Two other agents wheel a crate on a dolly.
I open the front doors and let them in. Wells follows us. Once we’re inside, one of the agents takes a crowbar from the side of the dolly and pries open the crate. Surrounded by a plush interior, like a piece of prized family porcelain, is the Shonin. He puts out a bony hand to me.
“Help me out of here, fatty. I’m an old man.”
I want to yank the prick to his feet, but I’m afraid of pulling off his arm. I give him a hand and let him pull himself upright. He adjusts his conical headdress and looks around the lobby.
“Not bad,” he says. “In my day, some families took their unstable relatives deep into the woods and left them there to die. Some became tengu. Most were just fox food.”
“Can you smell?” I say.
He nods.
“I can smell this place.”
The stink of the place is like a kick in the face. Shit, sweat, piss, and the disinfectant they used to try and mask it all. But riding on top of it all is the sweet reek of bad meat and the coppery aroma of blood. Wells pulls a surgical mask from his pocket and slips it on over his head.
“You don’t deserve it, but do you want one of these?”
I shake my head.
“It’s too late for that. I’m going to be smelling this place until New Year’s.”
He nods in something that actually looks like sympathy.
The Vigil boys and girls start piling in around us. Each new wave puts on surgical masks and respirators as they hit the lobby.
Wells talks to what looks like some team leaders and splits his crew into three squads. They fan out through the building carrying their ridiculous Vigil forensic gadgets. The mix of Pentagon high tech and angelic add-ons gives them a look like fifties science fiction crossed with eighties video games. Some devices float down the hall in front of the operator, while others hang around agents’ necks. Others they wear like exoskeletons. They look like they’re off to a Forbidden Planet masquerade ball.
Wells’s cell phone rings. The Shonin and I start inside without him.
The place looks like a regular hospital reception area if you don’t know what to look for. There are holes in the ceiling above the intake counter where bulletproof glass covered it back in its prisoner incarnation. Pull up the beige carpet and you’ll find scratch marks from the metal detector and two sets of gates. You go to the first and have to be buzzed through the second into the prison area. Once you’re past that first gate, if the guard on the second gate doesn’t like your look, he can lock down his side and you’ll be trapped in a steel cage.
There’s a long hall beyond reception that leads past the old prison cafeteria. They’ve transformed it into a homey dayroom with better furniture than any agent in this building has. Past that is a lockdown ward where the old prison doors have been left in place.
All the other doors have ten-key pads and card readers, including the employee restr
ooms. The real giveaway that the place used to be a prison is the other restrooms. Pure jailbird stuff. Clear plastic doors with a clear view of the toilet so the orderlies can make sure the patients aren’t using drugs or each other. Maybe this place helped its patients, but I bet it made its staff a little crazy.
Wells comes up behind us with a piece of paper he must have picked up in reception. It’s a sketchy map of the hospital layout. So far, nothing looks out of place.
“The initial report was that all the rodeo was down in the chapel,” he says, and consults the map. “This way.”
We find it around another corner. Like a lot of hospitals, it’s a quiet nondenominational place. Back before the fun and games it might have been pretty. It’s big enough to hold a congregation of maybe a hundred people. Not anymore. Someone pulled all the pews out of the floor and tossed them into the hall. All that’s left of the original chapel are the stained glass windows and the altar. The rest is slaughterhouse chic by way of the Sistine Chapel.
Half finished, maybe rejected chop-shop bodies lie in piles on either side of the chapel doors. Body parts—arms, legs, internal organs, and more—are grouped together around the walls like some kind of cannibal food court. A worn gurney crusted with dried blood sits in the center of the room, a discarded woman’s arm and a heart tossed on top.
Like the meat locker, the chapel has been transformed into Angra party central. The place has thirteen naves. In each hangs a naked chop-shop body crucified upside down. The cover on the altar is gone. In its place is a stitched-together sheet of human skin. Here and there you can see moles. Old scars. Tattoos.
Aldridge said there were around ninety people inside the building, but there’s no way there are ninety bodies now. There aren’t enough parts left to make twenty. Saint Nick didn’t just play butcher boy here, he took some of his trophies home with him. Worse, from the look of the bodies’ decomposition, they weren’t all killed at the same time. It’s been maybe a day or a day and a half since the slaughter was really rolling along. Enough time for fresh bodies to enter and pass through rigor mortis and for the fresh meat to turn greenish-blue. Those are fresh kills. The patients and staff. But some of the bodies are swollen and the flesh raw and blistered. That takes around three days of decomp, which means Saint Nick didn’t just kill this bunch. He stockpiled bodies from another kill and brought them here. This is a busy, organized boy. I bet his record collection isn’t alphabetical. It’s a freaky, obsessive system by year and genre and probably color. Something only he understands. God help you if you put the Dead Kennedys near the Dictators. East Coast goes here. West Coast there.
But it’s not the corpses Saint Nick dragged here from his playpen that get to me. I keep wondering about the staff and patients. What would it be like to be the last person to go under the knife? To see almost ninety other people killed, gutted, and sewn back together again. I saw a few things during my years in Hell, but nothing like that. Maybe they party like that in one of the really shitty regions where guys like Stalin end up. The House of Knives, maybe.
In a weird way, I guess I was kind of lucky when torture time rolled around. I was never the last to get beaten or cut or spun around a Catherine wheel. The Hellions wanted to make an example of me, so I always went first. I never thought about that before. I didn’t have to wait and piss myself watching everyone else get hammered. I guess if you can get lucky being tortured, I was lucky.
The Shonin and I walk around the room, checking out the piles, trying to make sense of things. Wells stands in the doorway, arms crossed. The poor sap can’t come in. He’s a God-fearing guy, and if there’s any place I’ve seen in this world that says God’s away on business, this is it. At least when Aelita went batshit, she was just one angel and he could imagine a Heaven full of other good and true halo polishers. But this is a bad, bad place. Wells got the Vigil back together, circling the wagons of true believers, and this is what he finds. The wagons are burning. Everyone is wounded and the cavalry isn’t coming. Maybe that’s why he put on the surgical mask. He didn’t want his people to see him reciting Hail Marys.
I go over to the Shonin.
“Old dead mixed with new,” I say.
He nods his tea-colored skull.
“Yes.”
“What do think, could one man have done this over a long weekend?”
“Why do you say ‘man’? Everyone keeps saying man like it’s a fact.”
“You think Saint Nick is a woman?”
He shrugs.
“You think Saint Nick isn’t?”
We stop by a pile of naked torsos. Arms, legs, and heads cut off. Ribs spread where someone pulled out the organs. It’s like some kind of old Aztec sacrifice. I’m starting to wish I had a surgical mask, but I’m not about to ask Wells for one.
“What I’m saying is that moving this many bodies, and hauling more in from somewhere else fast enough to get all this done over a long weekend, is hard physical labor.”
“Not if she had help. Or if she used magic to move them and perform the surgery.”
“She would have to be a pretty powerful witch.”
“Yes.”
“So, you think Saint Nick is a woman.”
We walk back to the altar. The wet ceiling of the meat chapel extends from the back wall over to where we’re standing, turning the light pink.
“I doubt it,” he says. “I just object to assumptions.”
I look back to the door. Wells has taken a few tentative steps into the room.
The Shonin is probably right about one thing. If Saint Nick didn’t have help, he or she would be a world-class magician. I suppose an ordinary person could have gutted the bodies over a long weekend or could have made the meat church. But not both. That means using a crew or hoodoo. I hope to hell that Saint Nick had a crew. Worst-case scenario is someone with powerful hoodoo but with a crew too. That would put a Hulk Hogan–powerful magician right in the middle of an Angra sect. Why can’t nutcase killers get their orders from talking dogs anymore? Life was so much simpler when crazy meant crazy.
The Shonin says, “Why does Saint Nick cut up the bodies?”
“Because he’s an asshole with a Jack the Ripper complex.”
“Don’t talk like that. You know better.”
“I don’t know. He’s making offerings maybe. Killing people isn’t enough, so he cuts them up and puts pieces together ’cause the Angra prefer turducken to steak.”
The Shonin walks back to Wells, who’s come into the room. He’s walking from pile to gory pile, as stunned as Aldridge was.
“All you all right?” says the Shonin.
“Are you?” Wells says.
“This is a bad place. There’s an aura of malevolence. You and your people shouldn’t remain here long.”
Wells nods.
“I’ll pull them out after they sweep the building.”
The Shonin looks at me.
“These aren’t sacrifices,” he says. He points at the naves with the thirteen inverted bodies. “Those are sacrifices. The rest of these bodies, they are machines. Parts of machines. Do you see?”
“Not even a little.”
“Saint Nick is creating empty vessels. Inhabiting an intact human body would be difficult for a God. But by using specific parts of different bodies, someone could make something more suitable.”
“He’s making meat vacation homes for the Angra to move into?”
“The other Saint Nick murders and corpse defilements could have been experiments. Beta tests. Saint Nick was honing his talents.”
Wells says, “He’s never killed on this scale before. Why does he need so many bodies now?”
“Remember that the Angra aren’t just thirteen primary Gods. There are smaller pieces of the old ones on Earth.”
I look at Wells and back to the Shonin.
br /> “You mean demons? Qliphoth?”
The Shonin wipes a spot of blood from his robe.
“The Angra will want an army. One that can move and interact with the human world. Bodies built specifically to hold Gods or Qliphoth would make good vehicles for that.”
“But we talked about this once. About Lamia,” I say. “She had a body and lost it. But she could still kill as a ghost.”
“Yes. But when she lost her body she was just a fragment of a fragment of a God. Like a demon. If Lamia had access to one of the empty vessels when she was alive, humanity might be gone by now.”
“If Saint Nick is making an army, where is it?” says Wells.
The Shonin leads us out of the chapel and back into the hall. He closes the door behind us.
“That’s a very good question. And having succeeded in a mass killing like this, will he try more?”
I say, “Could Saint Nick’s chop-shop people do what he did and make more vessels?”
The Shonin leans on one of the broken church pews in the hall.
“I doubt it. This is very powerful magic. Qliphoth wouldn’t have the skill or knowledge for it.”
“What about another Lamia? A smarter piece of the Gods?”
“We would have heard about something like that by now,” says Wells. “The Vigil is always on the alert for reports of possible Angra infiltration.”
The Shonin puts his hand on my arm, steadying himself on the pew. If a dead man can look unwell, that’s how he looks.
“You got all this from that book you’re drinking?”
“Most of it. Why?”
“Think there might be another copy lying around somewhere?”
“It’s doubtful, but anything is possible. Do you know someone who might have one?”
There’s blood on the bottom of my boots. I scrape the soles on the side of a pew.
“I don’t know. You’re the expert. I’m just trying to keep up.”