Chapter 32

The General stepped into the farmhouse, set the alarm, and checked his watch. If the second act had started on time, he thought, Macbeth was about to get his head cut off. The General thought this fitting, as he himself was about to consult the Prince’s head in the Throne Room.

All part of the equation. Everything connected.

The General was happy to finally be home. True, the young man named Edmund had only stayed to watch the trap open for Duncan’s descent into Hell, but still it had seemed like a long time. Jennings had stopped by to see how things were going and told Edmund to go home; said he was a good worker and gave him a key to the tool closet—“for the summer theater season,” he added.

This sat well with Edmund Lambert, even though he would soon have no more need for the tool closet. In fact, he would be long gone by the time summer theater began. After all, it was during the summer that the Prince was prophe-sized to return—as in the old days, in the burning sun of noontime, bringing war and pestilence and destruction with the deadly harvest of the summer solstice.

And the Prince’s army would return with him; would be waiting by the doorway, ready to serve and pave the way for what was to come.

But someone would be waiting for the General, too. And once he was able to pass through the doorway, they would be together again. In this world or that? Well, the General wasn’t sure.

The General smiled and went upstairs, undressed in the bathroom, and stepped into the shower. And as he scrubbed off the remains of his day-life, his mind soon wandered to the young woman named Cindy Smith.

He turned up the water as hot as it would go and stood there watching as it reddened the flesh beneath the large tattoo on his chest and stomach. And when the doorway became numb with the pain, he closed his eyes and imagined Cindy Smith in her spirit costume, rising up from the trap and stepping through his flesh from the depths of Hell. He opened his eyes and gazed down at the doorway, half expecting to see her there with him in the shower, and saw instead that he had grown erect.

He would need to consult the Prince about all this; would need to look for her in his visions, in the flashes of images and sounds. He hoped he would find her there, and began to wonder if the she wasn’t part of the equation, too.