Kill Creek Page 6

  The soul was a parasite.

  Moore watched as darkened figures slid along the walls, appreciating genius in thirty-second increments. They were shadow people. They were nothing to her.

  She took her usual seat on the bench beneath the skylight and looked over at her favorite painting in the entire museum. Judith Slaying Holofernes, completed by Artemisia Gentileschi in the early seventeenth century. A servant held the villain Holofernes down while Judith forced the blade of a sword through his throat. He struggled, his hands pushing desperately against the chin of the servant woman, yet she refused to let go. The panic he must have felt, to wake up and find his head being severed from his body. The weakness. The impotence.

  Moore narrowed her eyes and stared into the absolute darkness between the servant and Holofernes. It was not the murderous women’s cold, calculated expressions that excited her. It was the abyss between these two struggling bodies. That space meant the strength of a woman above, the helplessness of a man below. Moore felt the collision of forces there—him pushing her away, her holding him down.

  The crossroads of pleasure and pain.

  The darkness seemed to expand before her, like a wormhole opening in deep space, pulling her further inside until it was all she could see. It wanted her. To know her. To devour her.

  Someone was approaching, a man in his fifties, thin hair ridiculously combed over his bald head.

  “T.C. Moore?” the man asked. He did not bother to hide the annoyance in his voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Patty asked me to bring you to the Conservation Center.” He followed this with a sharp breath.

  Moore let the corners of her mouth cut high into her cheeks. It was like seeing a snake smile.

  “Lead the way,” she said.

  The man identified himself as Chad. No last name. No title. Moore assumed he was a lackey sent to babysit the author during her research, and his increasingly dismissive attitude seemed to confirm this.

  The area into which Moore was led was not the dismal subbasement she had anticipated, but a brightly lit research space with long steel tables lined with computer monitors. She passed several men and women in lab coats who eyed her curiously, several smiling warmly. Moore kept her gaze straight ahead.

  “We have two impressionist paintings being restored, if you would be more interested in seeing that,” Chad offered.

  “Do I look like a fucking sixth grader on a field trip to see water lilies, Chad?” Moore asked.

  Chad glanced back at her and his eyes narrowed. “No, you don’t,” he said.

  At the far end of the room, a wooden table was set perpendicular to the others. A bright LED light rose up from the table on a long metal arm. Below this, illuminated in a soft halo of white light, was a clay tablet on a length of plastic sheeting. Etched into the tablet were crude images: a roaring lion, a one-horned goat, a buzzing insect with a human head.

  Standing nearby, his back to the wall, was a security guard in black pressed pants and a white shirt. He watched Moore out of the corner of his eye as she stepped up to the tablet.

  Chad thrust a hand out, stopping Moore from going any closer.

  “You can look from here,” he said.

  “Calm down,” Moore snapped. “I’m not going to lick the damn thing.”

  She scanned the various images. In the far right corner was a woman in a long cloak lined with an intricate pattern. She wore what looked like a square crown covered in flowers. A single braid curled down the back of her neck. The single eye in view was wide and knowing.

  Chad nodded toward the image. “That’s Kubaba. She was a Sumerian queen—”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry here, Chad,” Moore interrupted. “You can spare me the history lesson.”

  “I just thought you might like to know—”

  “About the only queen on the Sumerian King List? Ruled in the Third Dynasty of the Kish? Started her career as a tavern keeper before becoming one of the most powerful women in the world and later a Mesopotamian goddess, worshipped by multiple cults well into the second century? How am I doing?”

  Chad frowned. Clearly some of this information was new to him, and he was fighting the urge to challenge Moore on its accuracy. In the end, he simply chose to ask, “What exactly are we helping you with here, Ms. Moore?”

  “Research,” Moore explained. “For a book. Don’t worry, I can’t stay long. I’m on my way out of town.”

  “And why is viewing this tablet so important to your . . . book?” He said the word as if he found it hard to believe that the woman before him could be responsible for such a thing.

  “I wanted to see her eye,” Moore said.

  “Her eye?”

  Moore ignored the man at her side and leaned in closer to the tablet. She stared into the eye of Kubaba.

  How many kings did she see in her day? Moore wondered. How many men questioned her authority? How many Hittites looked into that eye, just as I am now, and attempted to channel her strength through sacred rituals of their own invention? How many succeeded?

  Chad cleared his throat.

  “You can go, Chad. There’s a guard right over there. He’ll Tase me if I try to run off with your tablet.”

  Chad did not bother to weigh his options. With an annoyed snort, he turned and walked away.

  Moore hovered over the tablet and soaked up every detail of the carving of the Sumerian queen. As she did, she began to imagine a kind of dark magic, one that could turn the inspirational strength of this woman into something destructive. Something intoxicating. Something addictive.

  For another twenty minutes, Moore did not move. Then, without warning, she turned on one heel and marched away, out of the Conservation Center and into the bright light of late morning.

  She had a plane to catch.

  SEVEN

  HE HAD ONCE heard that driving was a form of hypnosis.

  The hum of tires on the highway. The comfort of knowing that muscle memory is in complete control. Your mind begins to wander, and twenty minutes later, you don’t remember what you passed or if you signaled before changing lanes.

  The fire.

  The smell of burning flesh.

  His brother by his side as young Sam clutched his scorched arm to his chest and sobbed into his sleeve. Stop. Stop, stop, stop.

  Sam shook his head, clearing away the thoughts.

  He needed to be here. In this moment.

  Stay right here.

  There was a sudden thunk as his right front tire hit a pothole, and adrenaline shot through Sam’s bloodstream. Good. He was awake again. His mind cleared.

  In the backseat of the Audi was a duffel bag, stuffed haphazardly with random clothes for two full days. Someone named Kate from WrightWire had informed Eli that the interview could turn into a full-day walk-and-talk, something Kate had referred to (with what Eli presumed was a straight face) as celebrity vérité.

  It was beginning to make more sense to Sam. The absurd paycheck, the lack of details. It was how Wainwright operated. Keep the subject guessing. Change the rules often. Elicit an honest response.

  Fine. If a former club kid from Dublin wanted to spend an extra day with a Midwestern horror writer, Sam was willing to play ball. What else did he have to do? Sit alone in his house not writing his next novel?

  Sam exited onto Fourteenth Street and curved around to Broadway, past the Kansas City Convention Center, taking a hard right onto Tenth Street. Some of the buildings along this narrow street had been renovated, but many were still the same low redbrick structures that had lined the streets of downtown for decades.

  On his right, office and apartment buildings gave way to the towering spines of classic books: Catch-22, Fahrenheit 451, The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird. This was the exterior of the Central Library, its main façade designed to resemble one long line of three-story-tall vintage novels.

  This was where Wainwright had suggested they meet; the interview would begin with Sam McGarver wa
lking into a giant bookshelf.

  It did not matter if Sam remembered every detail of the drive from Lawrence to downtown Kansas City. He was there now.

  No turning back.

  The library was empty. Silent.

  Sam’s footsteps echoed off the marble floor as he made his way across the main lobby. Despite the fact that it was just barely evening, the interior of the library was surprisingly dim.

  “Hello?” he called out, and listened as the cavernous building devoured his voice.

  He glanced around. There was no one there to meet him. Not even another patron or a security guard.

  He was alone.

  Directly ahead of him, track lighting illuminated a set of wooden double doors. Sam pushed them open. The click of their latches was like a gunshot in a cave.

  He was now in some sort of grand hall. Large white pillars extended into the darkness above. And in the open space between these pillars were books. Stacks and stacks of books. It was a primitive skyline of literature stretching across the room, a miniature cityscape of bound pages.

  Thick, burgundy curtains had been drawn over the floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the hall, plunging the immense room into darkness. Strategically chosen track lights cast glowing white beams down onto each stack, a mixture of hardcover and paperbacks. They dotted the dim room like markers in a prehistoric burial ground.

  Sam slowly came to a stop.

  “What the hell . . .”

  At the center of the hall was a long wooden table covered with even more books. They were piled so high, they were spilling over. Several lights were angled directly at the piles of books, giving the table the unearthly appearance of a glowing toppled monolith.

  Sam realized for the first time that soft music was playing through unseen speakers, a strange industrial ambience with a vaguely hip-hop beat.

  He moved farther into the room, reaching the first of the book towers.

  Paperbacks. Suspiciously thin. Barely room for the titles and author’s name on the spines. The cover art was juvenile. Cartoonish. Reminiscent of the EC horror comics of the 1930s but without the subversive charm. Words were printed in an over-the-top, ghoulish font better suited for Halloween decorations. The titles, a collection of groan-inducing puns, suggested stand-alone stories in a series set at a haunted high school: Six Feet Underclassman, Homecoming Scream Queen, Killer Ride, The Ghoul Next Door, all under the series banner, Fear Resurrected. The intended audience was clearly teenagers looking for a gratuitous scare wrapped in heavy-handed morality. Even the author’s name sounded like a bad joke: Daniel Slaughter.

  Sam picked up the book on the top of the heap and gave its sides a light squeeze. The slender paperback easily buckled between his fingers. These were not multilayered narratives to be savored. They were candy.

  And just like candy, consuming too many of these in one sitting could make you sick.

  Confused, Sam set the book down and drifted out of the first shaft of light, into the darkness. He was beginning to see the room for what it was—a temporary museum, each tower its own exhibit. But why? What was the point?

  His shoes padded softly across the marble floor as he slowly made his way over to the next stack of books.

  Again, he picked up the book at the top of the stack. Much like Slaughter’s novels, the top cover of this book said it all, but that was where the similarities ended. In a photograph aged and blurred at the edges by a hazy vignette was the lower half of a naked woman, a man’s head pressed forcefully between her legs. Upon closer inspection, Sam noticed the ragged edge of the man’s severed neck and the glimpse of a straight razor handle held in the woman’s hand.

  The name of the author was scrawled into the cover as if by the blade of a Buck knife held in a quivering hand, but Sam didn’t have to read it to know who had written this aggressively sexual slice of horror fiction.

  T.C. Moore.

  Sam glanced around, now recognizing the telltale signs of Slaughter’s and Moore’s works on the sides of other nearby stacks. The books curved at odd angles, like the deformed vertebrae of twisted spines.

  What is this? he wondered. A museum of modern horror? Is this the setting for his interview? And if so, why are there stacks of books by other authors and none by—

  He froze.

  There on the table was a mound of his books. Hardcover. Paperback. English. French. Spanish. His four novels multiplied by format and language; his output made to look more prolific than it actually was.

  And yet it was a tribute, the same as the sloping towers for Daniel Slaughter and T.C. Moore.

  “Hello?” he called once more into the darkness. “Anyone here?”

  There was no reply.

  Sam sighed, annoyed. He did not like playing games.

  From behind him came the sharp click of the double doors opening.

  There in the doorway was a woman dressed in black skinny jeans, a body-hugging T-shirt randomly slashed to show glimpses of skin, and dark sunglasses in a chunky black frame. Onyx hair poured over one shaved side of her head and down her shoulder like spilled ink.

  Suddenly it came to him, the realization of who this person was, slamming into his brain like the key of a typewriter. Although they had never met, he knew who she was the moment he saw her. After all, he had just held one of her books in his hand.

  T.C. Moore cocked her head, equally confused by the sight of Sam.

  “Are you . . . Sam McGarver?”

  The gears in Sam’s mind locked.

  Moore marched into the room, heels striking with each controlled, deliberate step. She vanished into the shadows for a moment, then reemerged into the soft illumination of the first spotlight. She was strikingly beautiful, with knife-sharp features. Her entire body was tight, like a single contracted muscle.

  Despite the room being exceptionally dim, she still wore her sunglasses.

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked, her irritation loud and clear. “Where’s Wainwright?”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t know.” He nodded toward a stack of books to Moore’s left. “But I think those are meant for you.”

  She turned, regarded the stack with complete disinterest at first, then her face slackened as she stared at the spines, lost and confused. For the first time since arriving, she removed her sunglasses, letting them dangle, forgotten, in one hand. With the other, she picked up the paperback on the top of the pile and ran a silver-nailed thumb over her name.

  “What . . . what is this?” she asked, more to the room than to him.

  “I was hoping you knew.”

  She gripped her book tightly as she took in the rest of the stacks, recognizing Sam’s works. She spun to face him, and even in the low light, Sam could see her trademark pupil cutting a black swath across her iris.

  “You’re here for Wainwright too? You?”

  “Is it so unbelievable that he would be interested in me?”

  “Him, I believe. But his followers . . .” She shrugged. “Or maybe WrightWire is more middle-of-the-road than I thought.”

  Sam stiffened at the slight. “I prefer mainstream,” he said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Moore replied.

  The squeak of tennis shoes made both authors jump. Moore huffed like an irritated bull. She did not like being startled.

  A massive form filled the entire doorway, a perfectly round torso set atop short, stubby legs. The man’s chest rose and fell as he tried to hide the desperation of his breaths. He had obviously hurried to get to this section of the library, and he was not a man built for hurrying.

  “Is this where I come for the interview?” he asked in a breathless yet chipper voice.

  “And the hits keep on coming,” Moore growled.

  Sam recognized Daniel Slaughter immediately. He had seen Daniel at a couple of horror conventions early in his career, but the two had never spoken.

  Nothing like officially meeting in the most awkward way possible, Sam thought.

  Daniel
was in his midthirties, a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man who was quick with a warm smile. He was conservatively dressed in khakis, a light blue polo shirt, and a navy blazer. Around his thick neck hung a delicate cross on a thin gold chain, and squeezing the ring finger of his left hand like a string tied tightly around a sausage was a simple gold wedding band.

  Slaughter’s jolly grin slowly retracted as he saw the faces of Sam and Moore.

  “Am I in the wrong place?” Slaughter asked innocently. “I was supposed to meet someone named Wainwright.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Moore spat. She thrust a hand into a small leather purse hanging on her shoulder by a strap of black ribbon and pulled out her cell phone. “This is not . . .” She didn’t bother finishing her thought. She was already storming across the room, her face illuminated by the pale glow of the phone’s screen as she searched for a number.

  Slaughter turned back to Sam. “I don’t understand.”

  “I think I’m starting to,” Sam replied.

  And so Sam explained what he had just moments ago realized: it was a setup. They had all assumed they were the only ones being interviewed, and the fine folks at WrightWire hadn’t told them otherwise. Both Sam and Slaughter admitted they hadn’t bothered to ask; it didn’t even occur to them that there would be others involved. From the way she was furiously shouting a string of profanities into her phone, it obviously hadn’t occurred to Moore either.

  “So it’s a group interview?” Slaughter asked, tugging the bottom of his polo down over his bulging belly.

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, it seems that way.”

  “Just the three of us?”

  Sam frowned. He hadn’t considered that there might be more.

  His gaze drifted from the large, ruddy-cheeked man before him to the towers of books rising from the hall floor like paper stalagmites. There were at least twenty stacks positioned in an arc around the room table, and several piles heaped on the table itself. After finding his own novels there, Sam hadn’t bothered looking at the other piles.

  He crossed to the nearest pile: T.C. Moore. The next pile: Daniel Slaughter. The pile after that: T.C. Moore. The next stack was immediately familiar to him; the books were his own.