Page 32 of Her Dreadful Will
“Hey!” barked Vance. “This place is occupied, man. I got a girl coming in here in a second. Go find your own.”
“The girl won’t be back.” The tall young man flicked a hand toward the camera in the corner of the dance booth, and it popped and sparked, dying in a hiss of smoke. “I’ve paid her well to be elsewhere. It’s just the two of us now.” He sat down on the other end of the couch.
Vance almost bolted back through the curtains, but now that he was closer to this joker, he thought he recognized him. “Do I know you?”
“You visited my clinic a short while ago. Root canal. Too bad we ended up having to extract.” The man reached into his pocket and pulled something out—a coin? He wrapped it in his fist.
“I remember now,” Vance said. “You’re that new dentist in town, Dr.—Gavin?”
“Gilliam.”
Vance nodded. The dentist had been wearing glasses and a mask that day; no wonder he didn’t recognize him at first. Vance had gone to the new clinic because he couldn’t face Dr. Racklin, his family’s dentist. Dr. Racklin had fixed Kim’s chipped tooth after Vance knocked her into the counter. Of course Kim tried to cover up what had really happened; she told Dr. Racklin she’d tripped and hit her face on a concrete step, but the old doc always gave Vance the stink-eye after that. He hadn’t been fooled by the lie.
But he doesn’t have any proof, either, Vance reminded himself for the hundredth time.
“So, Dr. Gilliam—what do you want? I’m a ladies’ man, okay, so if you’re after male companionship—”
“If I were, do you think I would come toyou?” The dentist sneered. “No, Vance, I’m here because you’ve been very, very wicked. More so than usual. A friend of mine tried to fix your soul, because she’s far too kind for her own good—and I have a suspicion the repairs didn’t take.” He tossed the object in his hand. It landed in his open palm. With horror, Vance recognized it as a human molar.
“What is that?” Vance tried to scoot further away from the dentist, and found he could not move.
“This? Why Vance, this is your tooth. You don’t recognize it?” Dr. Gilliam pinched the tooth between his thumb and forefinger, and his smirk vanished. “It’s your day of reckoning, Vance. The end of the line.”
Vance opened his mouth to scream, but the dentist raised his other hand, and a horrific shriveling pain constricted Vance’s throat.
“I could make this quick,” said the dentist. “I could disintegrate your tooth right now, and you’d end along with it. Such is the power of a scrying tether in the hands of a witch like me.” He leaned forward, his eyes glittering like emeralds in a deep, dark mine. “But I don’t want to make it quick, Vance. I’m going to make you suffer, and I’m going to enjoy it.”
Still gripping Vance’s tooth, the dentist stretched out his other hand—a slim white hand with sharply protruding wrist-bones. Vance would have sneered and called it a girlie hand, were it not for the badass tattoos between the other man’s knuckles. He didn’t recognize the symbols, but they filled him with dread.
“Corruption and pain,” said the dentist quietly, and his hand contorted, the fingers crooking into an unnatural position.
A fierce pricking along Vance’s fingertips prompted him to lift his own hands. The nails were blackening, breaking, flaking away like soot. He stared in mute horror as the flesh of his fingers began to turn yellow, then brown, then mottled purple. The discoloration spread along his arms. Bubbles formed under the skin, bursting and leaking pus down his forearms.
Vance choked in a breath through his ravaged throat and tried to issue it in a shriek—but his vocal cords wouldn’t work. He suspected they were gone. And something—something was wrong with his mouth. He moved his tongue around, prodding his teeth, and pain shot through his jaws as the teeth knocked aside and tumbled from his loose gums like dominos. He spat the teeth out onto the floor. Strings of bloody saliva trailed from his lips. The nausea in his stomach worsened, spiking to a shredding agony so great he thought he might split apart.
Vance raised his swollen, streaming eyes to the dentist’s cool green ones.
“You want to ask why,” said the dentist. “But you already know why, don’t you, Vance? You know you deserve this.”
Vance shook his head desperately, and a shower of hair fell from his disintegrating scalp.
“You think I’m doing it because of your family, that it’s payback for the years of abuse. And it’s partly for that, yes. But it’s also because I happened to be watching you today, through this.” He held up the tooth. “And I know what you thought of doing to the girl in the shop. I know that you ran away before she could repair your rotted hunk of a soul.”
Agony spiked through Vance’s crotch, and he felt rather than saw his genitals shrinking, softening, oozing away to nothing. He collapsed on the couch, on his side, with his now-bald head inches from the dentist’s lap. The man rose and stepped away.
“I could stop this, you know. It’s harder to reverse the damage than to perform it, but I could do it. If you had the voice to beg, I know you would. So let’s pretend you begged, and that I ignored you.”
Vance could hardly see now. His eyes were enlarging in his skull, his nose sagging and melting from his face.
“I’m going to leave now, so you’ll be like this for a few more minutes. When I get to the parking lot, I’ll crush your tooth, and you will die. The coroner will believe you suffered from some rare disease—samples will be taken and your body will be studied, but no one will ever know the truth. Your wife and your children will be glad you’re gone. They will take the generous life insurance policy your company provides and thank the sweet Lord above that they never have to see you again.”
Vance barely heard the last words, but in the tornado of agony and darkness, he felt the tiniest flicker of satisfaction that Kim and the kids would be all right.
Better off without him.
“You were a waste of space, Vance,” said the dentist. “It’s a privilege to rid the world of you. Maybe I’ll see you in hell.”
Vance couldn’t see the man leave, but he felt the absence, the loneliness rushing into the tiny room—velvet-lined and padded and suffocating, like a coffin. He could sense the tether now—a thin chain connecting his consciousness to that of the dentist. While the rest of his body heaved with decay and his eyes burst, that chain glittered in his fading mind.
