“He brought them to the house?”
“Yes; to break up my party. Pure spite. It was his way of reminding me what he’s capable of.”
Marty stooped and righted another chair. He was shaking so violently, he feared if he didn’t sit down he’d fall down.
“The lieutenant was worse,” the old man said, “because he didn’t obey like Bella. He knew what had been done to him was an abomination. That made him angry.”
Bella had woken with an appetite. That was why she’d made her way up to the room she remembered most fondly; a place where a man who knew the best spot to scratch behind her ear would coo soft words to her and feed her morsels off his plate. But tonight she’d come up to find things changed. The man was odd with her, his voice jangling, and there was someone else in the room, one she vaguely knew the scent of, but couldn’t place. She was still hungry, such deep hunger, and there was an appetizing smell very close to her. Of meat left in the earth, the way she liked it, still on the bone and half gone to putrescence.. She sniffed, almost blind, looking for the source of the smell, and having found it, began to eat.
“Not a pretty sight.”
She was devouring her own body, taking gray, greasy bites from the decayed muscle of her haunch. Whitehead watched as she pulled at herself. His passivity in the face of this new horror broke Marty.
“Don’t let her!” he pushed the old man aside.
“But she’s hungry,” he responded, as though this horror were the most natural sight in the world.
Marty picked up the chair he’d been sitting on and slammed it against the wall. It was heavy, but his muscles were brimming, and the violence was a welcome release. The chair broke.
The dog looked up from her meal; the meat she was swallowing fell from her cut throat.
“Too much,” Marty said, picking up a leg of the chair and crossing the room to the door before Bella could register what he intended. At the last moment she seemed to understand that he meant her harm, and tried to get to her feet. One of her back legs, the haunch almost chewed through, would no longer support her, and she staggered, teeth bared, as Marty swung his makeshift weapon down on her. The force of his blow shattered her skull. The snarling stopped. The body backed off, dragging the ruined head on a rope of a neck, the tail tucked between its back legs in fear. Two or three trembling steps of retreat and it could go no further.
Marty waited, hoping to God he wouldn’t have to strike a second time. As he watched the body seemed to deflate. The swell of its chest, the remnants of its head, the organs hanging in the vault of its torso all collapsed into an abstraction, one part indistinguishable from the next. He closed the door on it, and dropped the blooded weapon at his side.
Whitehead had taken refuge across the room. His face was as gray as Bella’s body.
“How did he do this?” Marty said. “How is it possible?”
“He has power,” Whitehead stated. It was as simple as that, apparently. “He can steal life, and he can give it.”
Marty dug in his pocket for the linen handkerchief he’d bought specially for this night of dining and conversation. Shaking it out, its edges pristine, he wiped his face. The handkerchief came away dirtied with specks of rot. He felt as empty as the sac in the hall outside.
“You asked me once if I believed in Hell,” he said. “Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you think Mamoulian is? Something”-he wanted to laugh-“something from Hell?”
“I’ve considered the possibility. Brut I’m not by nature a supernaturalist. Heaven and Hell. All that paraphernalia. My system revolts at it.”
“If not devils, what?”
“Is it so important?”
Marty wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers. He felt contaminated by this obscenity. It would take a long time to wash the horror out, if he ever could. He’d made the error of digging too deep, and the story he’d heard-that and the dog at the door-were the consequence.