Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (39 page)

“Everything happens for a reason, I suppose,” Villanegre said. “But
if this lovers’ quarrel you’re having has anything to do with jealousy, just remember how easily the joy of having something can turn into the fear of losing it.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I have a question—why did the box open when Tommy and I touched it?”

“I think you know the answer,” Villanegre said. “Ben read it to us. ‘You, the holder of this sacred text, the keeper of these words, whose hands have broken this lock, you hold the secret, and you are charged by the fact of possession with a holy task.’ You’ve been chosen.”

“But we weren’t intended to hold the book,” Dani said. “Julie Leonard’s father was.”

“And after that?” Villanegre said. “You don’t think God would have left it all to chance, do you? I will tell you one thing. The fact that you can put your hands on the box together certainly proves one thing—you’re not demons in human form. We have learned over the centuries that demons are incapable of making contact with sacred objects or icons. Because it shames them, I suppose. Tells them how fallen their stature is. That’s why so many of the figures in
The Garden of Earthly Delights
are chimerical hybrids. The intended viewers would have been unable to look at a conventional rendering.”

“The statue of St. Adrian’s in the museum atrium,” Dani said. “Tommy noticed he wasn’t wearing a cross. He thought that was odd. He thought a cross would have made the St. Adrian’s student body uncomfortable. To say the least.”

“You know, at Oxford, when we teach art history, we give students a slide or a print of a painting and we say, ‘Tell me what you see.’ In America it’s the reverse; you sit in a big dark auditorium and a slide of a famous painting comes up and the instructor tells you what he sees. And what you ought to see. And half the students are so bored that by the third slide, they’re sound asleep. I’ve had a number of American graduate students who are very book-smart and can regurgitate what their professors told
them word for word. But Tommy has the other kind of intelligence. He can look at something and see it. And that kind of intelligence is rare. You may want to compliment him on it. I think he feels just a bit intimidated by Quinn.”

Villanegre smiled, then turned to Ruth, who offered him the last of the strawberry-rhubarb pie.

In the study, Tommy picked up the box and held it toward Dani. Together they pressed on the cross inlays in the correct sequence, and once again the box slid open.

“Pretty cool how it does that,” Tommy said. “Did you worry at all that this was going to be some kind of Pandora’s box? That once we opened it, we’d wish we hadn’t?”

“No,” she said. She grabbed his hand and held on to it. “Tommy—we have to talk.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Those are four words no man likes to hear.”

“It’s not one of
those
talks,” Dani said.

“You want to talk?” he said.

She nodded.

“Then we can talk.”

“The angel told us both, ‘How you handle it is going to make all the difference,’ right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I have not handled this well,” she said. “The problem from the very start is that we’ve stopped really communicating with each other. I should have come straight to you as soon as I started feeling the least bit jealous.”

“I agree with you about communication,” he said.

“Honesty is what matters,” Dani said. “So if you tell me you sent
Cassandra that text because you were feeling insecure, or because you wanted to fight fire with fire, or even that you were thinking you could fix her up with Quinn—whatever—I don’t care . . . just as long as you don’t try to tell me you didn’t send it. Just tell me what happened.”

He looked her in the eye for a moment. “I didn’t send it.”

Dani turned and stormed out of the room.

Tommy followed, passing Carl in the doorway on his way out.

“Is it okay if I look at the book?” Carl said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tommy said. “It’s all set up for you. Knock yourself out.”

Carl closed the door behind him.

Tommy caught up to Dani in the living room, where he grabbed her hand. She shook it loose.

“Dani—”

“You
really
need to stop talking right now,” she said.

“Dani, we just agreed that not talking was the wrong way to handle things. Talking is the way to handle things. We just said that, right?”

She looked at him, feeling hurt and a little ashamed for being so gullible, but she didn’t say anything.

“Just listen,” Tommy said. “Dani, I checked with Ben. I’m not denying that there’s a record of the text message on my phone, okay? And I’m not denying that Cassandra received it. But I was sound asleep when it happened. I can’t prove that, but it’s the truth. Ben said a demon could only send a text message if he took on some sort of physical form, and that didn’t happen, because when I went to bed, I left my phone on the food island to recharge, right in the middle of a completely lit kitchen. If any demon materialized in the kitchen, Carl would have seen it, because he was on watch.”

Both Tommy and Dani realized what he’d said as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“Carl!” Dani said.

Tommy ran from the room and burst through the door of his study,
Dani right behind him. They rushed into the room. On the floor next to the coffee table, Tommy saw the wooden box. It was empty.

He looked around. The window facing the front yard was open, and the screen had been punched out. The book, and the blanket it had been resting on, were gone. As was Carl.

36.

Tommy ran into the kitchen.

“Has anyone seen Carl?”

They heard an unmistakable, deep-throated growl, the roar of Carl’s motorcycle. Through the kitchen window he saw Carl speed away, heading for the front gate.

Tommy ran to his kitchen computer and punched up his security screen. He saw Carl fishtailing down the driveway and clicked to the camera covering his gate. The gate was open. When he tried to close it, the program asked him if he was the system administrator. He clicked yes, and the computer asked him for the password. When he typed it in, the computer told him it was the wrong password. He tried one more time, carefully, but got the same response.

“Carl changed the password,” Tommy said.

He reached for the hook where he kept his keys and grabbed his leather jacket. Before he could put it on, Dani stopped him, kissed him quickly, and handed him his .45 caliber Taurus automatic. They both knew Carl was not Carl anymore, and that the book could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

Tommy ran to the garage and threw open the last bay door. He put the key in the ignition of his Harley-Davidson Night Rod, squeezed the clutch
with his left hand, and said a little prayer as he pressed the ignition. The bike roared to life on the first try. He throttled up once, throttled down and let the clutch out, leaning hard to the right as he screeched out of the garage, already in third gear by the time he was on the straightaway leading to the gates.

Once he was on the street, he whipped his head left and right, left and then right again, looking for a taillight. Had Carl gone north, toward the countryside, or south, toward town? He saw a single red taillight cresting a far hill, jerked his bike to the right, and hit the gas. He had a fair idea of where Carl was headed.

Tommy had driven this road many times, and driven it too fast too many times. He held the throttle full back and toed the bike into its highest gear, downshifting into the curves but leaning so far into the turns that his knee was a foot off the black asphalt. The Michelin “Scorcher” tires were as fat as an automobile’s, built for racing, as was the 1250-cubic-centimeter liquid-cooled V-twin engine that kicked out 122 horsepower, capable of flinging the 900 pounds of bike and rider down the road at 150 miles an hour. At the first hill, Tommy’s bike sailed two feet above the ground before landing rear tire first on the downslope.

Tommy knew he was a better rider than Carl. They’d even joked about it, and they’d had a few races on empty back-country roads where there was no traffic and the possibility of endangering other drivers was negligible.

Tommy had never tried too hard to understand why, but the simple fact was that he was good at every sport he’d ever tried. He could pick up a bowling ball, roll a gutter ball his first ball, knock down nine on his second, and end up rolling a 284 the first time he tried bowling. He’d been a three-sport All-American in high school, but had dropped basketball in college to concentrate on football and baseball. Even so, in addition to being a first-round draft pick in the NFL and heavily recruited by a half dozen professional baseball teams, he’d also been a third-round pick by the Boston Celtics. His physical gifts, which he could only think of as
God-given, extended to the operation of mechanical devices and motor vehicles. Skateboarding and snowboarding came naturally to him, as did mountain biking and motocross. There were faster motorcycles in the world, but there wasn’t a faster motorcycle in Westchester County that night, and there wasn’t a better rider.

Tommy knew he was going to catch the older rider. And Carl knew it too.

Carl had snatched the book off the coffee table by wrapping it in the blanket and carrying it in a sling. He was unable to touch the book—or rather the beast inside of him, the one controlling him, could not touch it—but he managed to get it out the window and into the touring bag strapped to the sissy bar above his rear fender. He’d sped off on his motorcycle thinking only that he had to deliver the book to the school, where Wharton or Ghieri would know what to do with it. Then he’d be free of the demon inside him.

Yet as he rode, he felt something return to him, a kind of control or autonomy that had been absent since the demon had entered him. He could tell the bike where to go and how fast, and the faster he went, the more in control he felt. Before, when his thoughts troubled him and he needed to rebalance, Carl had discovered that with the wind in his face and the rumble of the road and the thundering machine beneath him, he could enter a kind of consciousness some might have called contemplative or meditative; he knew it as a state of constant prayer, a kind of worship in motion that at times approached religious ecstasy. It wasn’t that riding relaxed him, which was what he told people, but more that with his body fully engaged in the operation of the machine, his mind was free to engage in the kind of deep prayer other people needed quiet chapels and stainedglass windows to achieve.

When he slowed down, he felt the thing take hold of him again, but when he sped up, it let go, as if it were afraid of the speed and the violence the motorcycle created.

He looked in his rearview mirror and saw a lone halogen headlight, a bright bluish white that he knew was Tommy’s. “Come on, man!” he shouted. “Catch me!”

It was the first time since he’d been so careless as to invite the demon in that he’d spoken words completely of his own choosing.