The Dark Need by Stant Litore Page A

grew, and he lifted the needle near his eyes to look at it. “No, don’t call me House. Call me Lugosi. Doctor Lugosi. More appropriate, don’t you think?”
    Without any change in that smile or in his eyes, he bent over Oscar and slid the needle quickly into his neck. The sharp prick of it.
    Oscar gasped, kept gasping in sharp, terrified breaths.
    “Now, stop that.” Another slap to his face. “Hyperoxygenated blood doesn’t taste nearly as nice. It’s memories I’m after, not oxygen. I can breathe whenever the hell I want. This…” He gave a soft shiver, a movement nearly sexual. His face flushed, eyes dark with anticipation. “This is a rarer feast.”
    “Don’t!” Oscar cried. “God. Don’t. What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
    “Because you need it.” The man stared down at him, and Oscar realized suddenly what was so strange about his eyes: he rarely blinked.
    “You need it,” the doctor said softly. “You’re not a religious man, are you, Oscar?”
    Oscar just stared.
    “No, I didn’t think so. Not out here, alone. No priest. No wife even, no one to confess to. But you’ve done things, Oscar, regretted things, or you wouldn’t have seen me wearing a mask of the dead.” He ran the tube through a small hand pump and placed the other end of the tube into a small wooden bowl. “But I can help you, because I’m a doctor. A very special kind of doctor.”
    The doctor ran his fingers along the tube where it lay across the bed, and Oscar tensed.
    “You’ve probably done horrible things, or seen horrible things. Horrible things in your blood. Not to worry. I will take all the bad blood out.” Again that cold smile. The stranger reached into his bag, and Oscar’s gaze followed his hand, his throat dry. His captor pulled out a roll of black duct tape, and Oscar’s eyes widened. The harsh rip of the tape, then, even as he sucked in breath to scream, the stranger shoved the heel of his hand against Oscar’s chin, clacking his jaw shut, hurting him. Then the tape was warm and sticky against his lips, his cheeks, sealing his mouth shut. Almost gently, the stranger smoothed down the tape.
    A small, lost whimper in Oscar’s throat.
    “Yes,” he crooned. “Empty you out. Leave you dried out and clean and pure. In the old days, I would have covered every inch of your body in leeches. Let them do it the slow way. They used to call us that. Medical people. They called us leeches. These aren’t the old days, though. No, they aren’t.”
    He tapped Oscar’s cheek twice with his fingers, then reached for the little pump.
    The duct tape muffled Oscar’s screams. Only the face-changer heard them, the face-changer and the mice that lived in the wall behind the old armoire that had belonged to Oscar’s wife. No one else. Outside Oscar’s house, the snow fell soft, silencing the whole world, erasing footprints, muffling all sounds, even the dreams of small lives living in burrows or inside of trees, and concealing all mankind’s secrets.

3
    The hunt
    Over the past three days Matt had tracked the killer from Stanwood to Arlington, then up into the Cascades to tiny settlements that had no real road. He didn’t know the murderer’s name or his motive or whose house he would visit next, but Matt Cahill did know one thing.
    The man had been touched by Mr. Dark.
    His face—
    It had been a long time since Matt had seen a face that terrible. It was as though even the man’s bones had been eaten away by the maggots beneath his skin. Matt had glimpsed him by chance in Anacortes, across a busy street, the day before the killings had started across the water in Stanwood.
    Matt had found Stanwood buzzing with word of an elderly couple who lived with their niece in a trailer just off the county road. The two elderly ones had been drained empty, the blood sucked right out of their bodies. The niece had been nowhere to be found. In Arlington, it had been a youth pastor whose wife had been trying