The 13th Read online

  The 13th

  John Everson

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  THE NIGHT OF THE RITUAL

  The invitation had arrived two days ago. Even now, Alan couldn’t believe he held it in his hand. How long had he waited for this? Half of his life. He’d barely been nineteen the last time someone had tried to invoke The 13th. And that had ended very, very badly. He could still feel the warmth of the blood running fast between his fingers, the sensation of the guiding spirit running violent hands through his hair as he had laid the bodies of the Eighth and the Ninth to final rest on the floor of the old hotel.

  Now he was forty-five, and the invitation shook in his fingers. Actually, he was the one who shook; the invitation was neutral. It only said one thing:

  THURSDAY NIGHT, II P.M.: THE 13TH.

  Someone not in the know might have pointed out that Thursday was not, in fact, the Thirteenth. But to Alan, those words could only mean one thing: the hotel was alive again…

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Excerpt

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Other Leisure Books by John Everson:

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Twenty-five Years Ago

  The room would have felt closed in and dark…if not for the Christmas lights. They trailed in long sparkly strands across the shadows, white globes illuminating the horror on the floor like gently oscillating spotlights. They would have been cozy warm…if not for the hell they revealed. Some of those long white globes were speckled in dark spots. And some of those spots were clearly, nauseatingly, crimson.

  Beneath those swaying holiday orbs ran drying rivers of stagnant red.

  “Oh my God,” breathed the officer on duty, just before turning his mouth to the side and retching into the darkness. Maitlin was young, only a few months on the force in Castle Point. Up to now, the most disturbing thing he’d probably witnessed was the diaper of a newborn. His horror at the current scene was audible in the quiet room…and the gagging smell of his fear melded with the raw iron stench of blood that soured the room.

  The captain choked back his own disgust, but soldiered on, urging Officer Maitlin to follow. “There may be survivors,” he said, though his voice did not sound hopeful.

  “Of this?” the rookie gasped, looking up from the shadow of his weakness.

  “No matter how bad it looks,” the chief said, “there is always someone left.”

  Just then, Maitlin’s toe stopped dead on the rebound from something soft. Something spongy.

  He bent down, and in complete disbelief, reached down to retrieve the object of his toe stop.

  The captain’s eyes bugged out as Officer Maitlin lifted the disembodied limb from the red goo of the floor like a soiled party favor.

  “Do you think so?” the rookie asked, brandishing a stiff arm in his grip. He pointed the gory piece where a shoulder should have been at the face of his boss. From another vantage point, it might have looked as if he were shaking hands with the corporeal appendage of the air. The tips of glossy, long red fingernails seemed to grip his wrist.

  “No, sir,” Officer Maitlin said, his voice filled with the hysteria of “last straw.”

  The captain looked at the severed arm for a moment in the shadows of the hotel basement and shook his head slowly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me either. Let’s get out of here.”

  But just as the two turned to leave, a moan came from behind.

  “Oh shit,” the captain mumbled, and turned toward the sound. The corridor in the back of the room was pitch-black; they hadn’t investigated what charnel secrets lay behind the veil of darkness there. They really, really didn’t want to. But they couldn’t ignore a victim in pain.

  Officer Maitlin’s hand slid to the holster and his fingers toyed with his gun. He’d never used it, except in target practice at the academy. But he was ready to now. They’d gotten the anonymous telephone tip that people had been butchered at the old hotel an hour ago. Nothing could have prepared them for what they’d found when they’d walked through the half-open front door of the building.

  The moan came again, and the captain motioned him to follow. He fingered a cigarette lighter and held it in the air to light the way. The feeble light flickered off surfaces that seemed to ooze with wetness. Maitlin thought it looked red in the orange glow of the flame. But he didn’t dare lean in closer to see if his supposition as to its nature was true. He’d seen enough in the long basement room.

  “This place is a slaughterhouse,” he breathed.

  At his words the moans grew louder, and the captain suddenly dropped to his knees.

  The source of the moans lay on the floor, naked and crumpled against the wall. Maitlin saw the whites of her eyes before anything else; they were staring in terror at something just beyond his left shoulder. As he joined the captain, she shuddered, and the red glistening mess that had once been her belly opened wider. Too wide.

  The rookie turned away, his gorge rising as the woman’s insides turned out.

  “Who are you?” the captain whispered, putting a calming hand on her forehead. His fingers stuck to the drying blood in her long matted hair.

  The dying woman’s eyes flickered, and for just a second, focused on the captain’s sympathetic face.

  “The Twelfth,” she whispered, and then her eyes went wide once more.

  This time, they didn’t close again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  David Shale pushed a foot toward the ground with an audible gasp. Then he did it again, with
the other. “Sheeeit!” he yelled, and stabbed a foot down again, struggling to keep a steady rhythmic drive on the pedals that had been steadily slowing as he and his Triomphe climbed a summit of Crossback Ridge. The trees surrounding the narrow, snakelike road didn’t answer, but a humid breeze slipped across the back of his neck like an intimate breath. When he’d left the sleepy town of Castle Point he’d been a well-oiled engine, feet rising and dipping with the precision of pistons, steadily adding speed and distance to his ride. But now, twenty minutes later, the sweat dripped from his forehead like a bad leak and his legs were on fire with fatigue. You didn’t fast-pump your way across the ridge. At least, normal folk wouldn’t. But David wasn’t interested in normal. David was interested in the Olympic cycling team. And after leading Boston University’s cycling team for two years and then washing out at the Olympic tryouts, David was definitely not interested in a normal training regimen. Training “normal” was cool for college. It didn’t cut it for where he wanted to go.

  So this summer, when he’d come to stay with his aunt for break, he’d decided to use her backyard as the course. Nobody biked Crossback Ridge. Hell, most people wouldn’t hike it.

  “Fuckin’ shit!” he added for emphasis, and pumped an impossible pedal down toward the potholed and much-patched asphalted surface that this backwoods county called a road.

  Something like a tear squeaked out of the corner of his left eye and he pushed his other foot down with a moan. If you’d called it a tear he would have punched now and asked what you meant later. David Shale was no sissy. It was something else that definitely was not a tear. “Fuuuuck!” he screamed in a voice that echoed back across the ridge like a moose call. “Damn, damn, damn,” he huffed, slowly picking up speed again.

  It was going to be a long summer.

  The climb ended without warning. One minute, David was straining to keep the wheels creeping forward, standing hard on the pedals for every inch. The next, and he was above the ridge, high on the plateau, looking out over a drop of hundreds of feet of emerald green. The roadway was cut into a limestone rock face behind him, and at the top, a lone tree hung like a slanting bonsai over the cutback. But as the road continued, it disappeared around the bend of the ridge and down at a breakneck drop. Here, for a few yards, was the only flat surface he’d seen in the past hour.

  David stepped off the bike and gently laid it to the gravel. He stepped to the edge of the ridge, and took a deep breath, crouching down to ease the strain in his legs, which currently felt something like unbendable iron rods. The air was clean, rich in the scent of…life. For miles all around, the landscape was blanketed in trees, riddled with hidden creek beds and broken by clearings full of wildflowers. This was unspoiled wilderness. “God’s country.” This is the feeling I’ve missed since I’ve been away from…Something caught in his throat as his mind choked on the word…home. He didn’t know where home was anymore, which was why he was spending the summer with his aunt. Since the fire, David had been on his own, always with a roof, but never a home. But still, he’d spent plenty of time visiting these hills over the years, and so in some way, it was a homecoming. Point was, air just didn’t smell like this anywhere else.

  As his panting slowed to a semblance of normal respiration, David noticed a small plume of smoke from a spot just a little way down the ridge. He followed it to the ground with his eyes and squinted, then crooked an eyebrow. The smoke was coming from the old Castle House Lodge!

  His stomach lurched. What if the place was burning down? Castle House had been closed for most of his life. Even as an outsider who came up here to visit once in a while, he knew the stories. It was the local equivalent of a haunted house—an old mansion from another era, fallen on hard times and long boarded up. Before the depression, the place had been a private resort hotel for the turn-of-the-1900s rich. And unlike a lot of big-money kinds of resorts, the place had survived the ‘20s and ‘30s and staggered on as a destination for families with names like Rockefeller into the ‘50s. But then the whole ridge changed. The rich and famous stopped going to the hill country for vacations, and the minor industry that kept the nearby town of Castle Point afloat found itself trumped by river port towns with cheaper labor and easier transportation. The sleepy little outback got more tired.

  Castle House Lodge had closed and the level of clientele that crossed the ridge took a turn for the blue-collar. The lodge had reopened a handful of times to steadily decreasing success, and sometime in the Reagan years there had been the murders there—a grisly, horrible episode—and the place had been boarded up and abandoned for, what the town had assumed was, good. Since then, it had slowly descended into the realm of legend. It didn’t take long before there were ghost stories attached to the place. The cries of disembodied infants echoing out through the windows of the old hotel to carry over the ridge. Spirits glimpsed furtive and faint in the surrounding woods at night, moaning at ethereal pains. Bloody Mary inhabited the top floor. A ghoul dragged the unsuspecting into the catacombs of the cellar.

  Kids snuck out here sometimes late at night and dared each other to enter the place, armed with just a flashlight or a candle. Wet crotches frequently ensued when a bat or a night bird exploded from a rafter, its privacy disturbed.

  David had kind of grown up with the legends of Castle House. So it was not surprising when he realized that the place was not burning, but in fact was apparently inhabited again, that he stood up from his crouch, put a hand across his brow and said aloud, to no one in particular, “What the fuck?”

  He’d been intending to turn around at this point and take the long coast downhill back home as a prize for a hard ride of sticking it out…but now he picked up his bike and aimed it downhill in the wrong direction…away from home and toward the entry road to Castle House. He’d come this far, and had to see what was going on down there…Was someone opening up the hotel again? Who in their right mind would take a plane into Castle Point and then rent a car to cross the ridge just to have a vacation in the hills in this day and age? Spas were a dime a dozen, and most were easier to access.

  David shook his head, and kicked off down the hill.

  You could see it from the road as you coasted down…the trees obscured it from some angles, but as the asphalt twisted, you could catch glimpses of the yellowed gables and green shingled cupolas of what had once been a grand castle of a building. As the road curved to turn off into the drive to the old building grounds, David braked and stopped. He stood for a moment, looking down the shadowed roadway. Once it had probably been a stand of proud, sculpted trees guiding travelers to the upscale Gothic-spired mansion at its end. Now it was an overgrown tunnel, branches hanging low across the road to form a seamless canopy over the broken asphalt in between.

  David hesitated. You could just barely make out the start of the resort grounds at the end of the dark road. Should he pedal his way in and check it out? It was getting late in the afternoon and it was going to be a long, hard drive back, without a side trip. Did he need to add an extra mile onto his aching thighs’ odometer?

  He shrugged and pushed his jeans back to the seat. “No pain, no gain, right?” he mumbled aloud, and kicked the bike into motion again. He was curious.

  In the back of his head, he heard the unspoken reply.

  Curiosity killed the cat.

  Christy Sorensen gunned the engine once more to punch the Olds up the last jog of the hill. She knew the turnoff was just ahead, but the old ‘78 was not firing on all cylinders these days. Or something. “Piece of shit,” she murmured, and pushed her foot to the floor hard, kicking the back tires out for a second. The resulting swoosh and sway of the back end made her grin.

  “Still something to be said for rear-wheel drive,” she added. And then swore.

  “Fuck me!”

  The turnoff to the Castle House was…NOW.

  Christy pulled the steering wheel hard to the left, felt the rear end slide on loose gravel and saw the trees that should have been on the side of
the car loom dead in front of her. She corrected and yanked the wheel to the right, pulling the car out of imminent collision with the forest and fishtailing back onto the road to the old lodge. And found a reason to swear yet again.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” she screamed and yanked the wheel back to the left. A biker was pedaling down the center of the road, and her radiator was aimed right at his ass.

  The car was still shimmying from her poorly executed turn and Christy couldn’t pull it out in time. The biker looked up at the last second, and she saw his eyes widen as the grill of the Olds kissed the rubber of his rear wheel.

  Her heel pushed the brake to the floor and her shoulders screamed as she slammed the wheel to the left, but it wasn’t enough. The bike shuddered and collapsed at the impact and the guy lost his grip on the handles and for a brief, kidney-clenching moment shot sideways through the air. His flight came just in time as the front wheels of the car crunched over the rear wheel and vacated seat of the bike before hitting the ditch to the left and stopping finally, the air echoing with the screech of brakes and rattle and roll of a hubcap that left the car when it left the road, and proceeded to twirl around and around like an old tin cup on the pavement.

  Christy looked up and saw the brown of the tree trunks inches away from the car’s front bumper, and took a deep breath.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she whispered, and clicked the release on her seat belt. How the hell was she going to report this?

  CHAPTER TWO

  David heard the roar of an engine just behind and looked up in time to see two headlights bearing down like a death sentence. His surprised eyes caught just a hint of two equally shocked brown eyes behind the windshield, and then he was no longer sitting on his bike. The green of tree branches and long grass filled his mind and then a smash of dirt filled his mouth as he connected with the ditch and rolled. He felt something hot flash in his back, and then his forehead smacked against something that, had he remained conscious, he would have described as something not unlike the business end of a fraternity brotherhood paddle. You never want to experience the business end of one of those, if someone else is swinging it.