Night Terror (24 page)

The giant strode down a long, dimly lit corridor, with thin carpet and concrete block walls. Through a heavy metal door they came to a wooden stair, and the boy took the man’s hand and followed him upward. Cooder felt every quivering clawnail as the rat shimmied up the open
treads behind the booted feet. The rat struggled to regain control of its body, terrified by the light, the open air, and the giant man hulking over it, but Cooder wouldn’t let go.

At the top, rather than a landing, a trapdoor apparatus blocked their path. The man reached up and lifted it easily, still guiding the boy with his hand. He raised the youngster above his head and followed him out, with the rat scurrying after. The shaking animal dropped onto the concrete floor of the large dark room, just as the man flipped a switch turning on a couple of bare bulbs high overhead. But even then, the area was so large that the dusty fixtures gave off only the barest of light. The ceiling disappeared in deep black shadows and, when the rat glanced in his direction, the man had vanished as well. But the boy didn’t move.

The rat slunk back into the shadows and watched. There was a rustling sound and in a moment the man returned carrying a child’s bike.

“Here,” he said.

The boy climbed on and pedaled around the shadowed perimeter of the room. Over and over. In tighter and tighter circles. Faster and faster. Until he was out of breath and the man lifted him off the bike and left with the bike once again. The boy stood in the center of the giant room then, glancing toward the far end of the building, but the rat could not see that far, its eyes were made for small dark spaces.

“Sorry,” said the man, returning and shepherding the boy back toward the hidden entrance. “We can’t stay up long tonight. Trouble’s coming.”

Cooder knew the man was right. He could sense the trouble, in the basement and in the forest around his
real
self. It was coming right now. Right here. He took two steps backward and dropped over the lip of the road, landing on his hands and knees on the steep slope and sliding roughly to the bottom. He buried his face in the tall grass and listened as tires hummed across asphalt and then the exhaust thrummed away around the far curve. And all that time— as the car neared and then drew away—he sensed the danger the way a rabbit senses a coyote lying just outside its burrow. Danger so terrible that the boy and the giant and the rat were completely forgotten in the rumbling of his own heart and the chill sweat that trickled down his brow.

She’s back.

The words flashed across his mind a full minute before he understood them. He had the feeling a small child gets, hiding beneath the covers, listening to footsteps in his bedroom in the middle of the night. His mouth went dry and he shivered, sharp pebbles cutting into his palms and his cheeks as he clutched at the slope.

“Try a little harder!”

The words echoed down the halls of his memory and he felt the electrical jolt that blasted through his brain and exited out every tortured pore in his body. And he had tried harder, but not the way she meant. There was nothing he could do to stop the pain. He could not please the voice in the darkness. In fact, he knew if he
did
please it, then he would surely die.

And now she was back. The witch that had been hiding in the back of his mind, in the deep black hole of his memory all this time, had returned. Just like he always knew she would. When a car shot past in a whirr of tires and rumbling exhaust, headlights disappearing around the far bend, it was like being shot at and missed. But she was gone now and the woods were silent as death once again. Cooder’s heart took a long moment in slowing, his chest still pounding for air, but the air itself seemed fouled by the auto’s passage.

“She’s back,” he whispered, spitting grit out onto the grass.

38

VIRGIL LEANED AGAINST THE HEADBOARD
and stared

blankly at the TV. He had no idea what the program was. The volume was turned off, but the flickering screen seemed to soothe Doris whenever she awakened, as she did often now. Every few minutes she would start, her eyes would pop open, and she would be as disoriented as a newly hatched duckling.

Virgil knew the end was near. She’d be lucky to make it through the week. He couldn’t believe how fast she’d sunk in only a couple of days. She felt as light as a feather against him. Grasping her tiny wrist in his palm, bone was all he could feel.

“Virg?” Her voice sounded like a whisper, but he didn’t think that she meant it to.

“Yes?”

She slipped her hand out of his and patted his thigh. “Are you all right?”

He was glad that she was leaning back against his chest and couldn’t see his eyes. “Am
I
all right?”

She nodded weakly. “You don’t look good.”

“Yeah, sure, honey. I’m okay.”

“I don’t have the strength to argue.”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“Then answer me true.”

“All right.”

“What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

How could he answer that? Tell her he was going to slip his service pistol out of his holster, lie down beside her, slide the barrel between his teeth until he could feel it biting into the roof of his mouth, pull the trigger, and blow his brains all over the inlaid headboard? “Try to go on.”

“You promised.”

“I don’t know if I can live without you.”

“We’ll be together again soon.”

“I want to be together now.”

He couldn’t tell if she was sighing or just trying to catch her breath.

“Promise me you won’t do anything to yourself. You have unfinished business here.”

“What business?”

“You didn’t promise.”

“What business?”

“Those boys, for one thing.”

“Someone else can work on the case.” That was the closest he’d ever come to admitting to Doris what he intended to do.

“Why did you go out to the Bocks’ on Saturday?” she rasped.

“Who told you about that?”

She turned her head to him and smiled. He struggled to imagine her old face over this new one. “I still have my informants,” she said, coughing into her hand.

He sighed. “Audrey thought she saw a Peeping Tom.”

“Oh, my Lord. Did you find out who it was?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if there really was one.”

But he didn’t believe that anymore. He believed Audrey. She was too sure. And Richard backed her story. But it was the trail that had shaken Virgil, because although he had been denying it to himself, he could tell from experience it was man-made. Critters didn’t make trails like that. They went from point
a
to point
b
in a beeline, or at least the straightest path they could manage.

“I’m worried about Babs,” said Doris.

“Why in the world are you worried about her?”

“She thinks she’s going to die today, you know.”

“What? Why on earth would she think that?”

“Babs knows things.”

He sighed loud enough for her to hear and she dropped it and skipped to another fretful thought.

“I’m worried about the Bock girl too.”

“I’ll have one of the boys drive out that way every night,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

She tried to twist in his arms but didn’t have the strength. He had no idea what this conversation was costing her, but her breathing was as labored as though she were running a marathon. “So you
are
planning something.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We won’t be together if you do.”

The finality in her frail voice sent razors up his spine. She sounded so certain.

“Virgil, if you hurt yourself, you won’t get to the other side. At least not to where I’m waiting. Do you want to leave me there by myself forever?”

“No.”

“Then promise.”

“I promise.”

“You’ve never broken a promise to me in your life.”

“I promise.”

“Good.”

She dropped off to sleep again, and Virgil took that respite to wipe his cheeks and nose with the back of his sleeve. He’d never broken a promise to her.

Only he didn’t think he could keep this one.

39

BABS SIPPED HER TEA
and stared at the tarot deck on the table in front of her.

She’d spent the day organizing the house. Every dish was washed, dried, and put away. Every linen was ironed and folded and stashed in the cedar chest. Every item of her clothing was clean as it had been the day she bought it, and hanging in the closet or folded in the dresser drawers. The carpet in every room was vacuumed, the last bag taken out of the machine, placed in the garbage, the garbage emptied into the can on the front porch awaiting pickup day. After that she’d balanced her checkbook, paid all her bills, and wrote a simple here’s-what-I-want will. It sat in a plain white envelope on the table beside her tarot cards.

She prayed heavily, confessing her sins to every deity she could think of, and asking forgiveness. She knew that she should probably be choosing a winner, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Regardless of what the preacher or Doris thought, the deities were just going to have to decide who got her when she got there. But at least if she was going to meet her Maker, Babs St. Clair was going to glory with a clean slate in every other way.

One thing that bothered her was the suddenness that the tarot foretold. That was the only way she could read the cards. If she had laid them out for anyone else she would have excused herself calmly and called all her friends over
to restrain the person before explaining the significance of her interpretation. Her best reading of the cards was that she was going to rise up to heaven like one of the saints.

The reading made no sense and, if it had been only the one time, she might have been able to dismiss it as a joke of the fates or a misshuffle on her own part.

But not four times.

So now she sat on the sofa, composing herself, practicing meditation, and awaiting whatever ending destiny decreed for her. She was perfectly at peace now. She knew that no matter what came, she could face it, knowing that it was only a brief instant in the scheme of things, and in the blink of an eye she would achieve eternal peace.

She was just emerging from the depths of her meditation when the doorbell rang.

Audrey sat in the old vinyl lawn chair, staring across the dark backyard at her garden. The drone of the television in the living room barely filtered through the screen door. Crickets
chirred
in the woods and somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. The occasional bat swooped across the moon, gorging on the night.

Ever since she’d freed herself of the dulling effects of the Halcion, she had been trying to reach out and contact Zach, testing her so-called
talent.
Once or twice over the past two days she had thought she had something, but then the feeling drifted away like smoke. The images she and Cates had dredged up were haunting her as well. She sensed deeper truths buried beneath the images, just out of reach, and she wanted desperately to move on, to work her way through them, to get better. And if Cates
was
right about her talent, then—regardless of what he said—she was certain she
had
been in touch with Zach. He was alive
somewhere
and he needed her.

The key to both problems lay in her mind, and the only way she knew to get to the answer was hypnosis. She leaned back on the chaise longue and closed her eyes, starting the sequence of counts that took her into a self-hypnotic state. She relaxed first her toes, then her ankles, her calves, her thighs, right up to her neck and head. She floated in a universe
of nonbeing, her senses dulled by lack of input, until she was only a thought. She felt herself being pulled away and she realized that the tug was wrenching her, not deeper into her mind, but out of it. To some other place.

The gloom around her formed itself slowly into a windowless room and light was coming from beneath a door. A hand reached out in front of her eyes—as though they were her own eyes, only smaller—and opened the door. At that moment she knew with every fiber of her being that she was not dreaming, not hallucinating. She was inside Zach’s head. She sensed him the way she had sensed him every time he was with her. The way she had discerned his restlessness in the night. The way she had experienced his pain the time he cut himself on a kitchen knife. She was telepathically feeling what Zach felt, seeing what he saw. He
was
alive! He was alive and he needed her. Her breathing quickened and she sat up stiff-backed in the chair.

He was wandering down a long, sloping hallway. The walls were stone or concrete block and the floor was undulating carpet, as though the base were bare bedrock. The lighting was poor, old bare incandescent fixtures, and there seemed to be fog, though Audrey was not certain whether Zach was actually seeing that or whether it existed only in her mind, clouding her vision. The scene reminded her of movies like
Alien
, where everything was dimly lit by flashing emergency lights and veiled in hostile shadows and mist.

She could feel Zach grasping at some newfound power of his own, the way a four-year-old will frown and bear down on a crayon. She couldn’t quite understand what he was trying to accomplish, but she experienced his concentration like a heavy presence weighing on her own mind.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

Her words carried on a wisp of breeze like butterfly wings. He gave no sign that he had heard, simply continued down the long, bleak corridor, exploring his dungeon. Ahead, through the fog and to the right, she saw another door. Zach approached it hesitantly. The handle, with its large, keyed escutcheon, was just below his line of vision. The door itself appeared ordinary enough. It was painted
with white primer and Audrey could see scratches revealing the gleaming aluminum beneath.

Doors and corridors. It seemed as though her entire world was somehow wrapped up in doors and corridors. The bleak dungeon in her barely revealed past. The long hallway of locked doors she and Tara had created in her mind. And now this. Even as strongly as she felt Zach’s presence right now—as though he were almost within her grasp, as though she could hear his soft susurrant breathing—the coincidence worried her, touched her with ice-rimmed fingers of doubt. Was she imagining this after all?

It seemed like minutes before Zach’s small hand reached out for the handle. His fingers hung a millimeter above the brass, quivering, as though the handle were electrified. Audrey thought that it might be. If not electrified, then somehow
horrified.
She willed him not to touch it. To back away and run. Somehow she knew that this was not the exit. Was Zach telling her that? Or was it the tiny voice in the back of her head that kept telling her that it wasn’t a real door at all, that it was like one of the doors in her mind and that if the Zach in her mind opened it now, all hell was going to erupt out of it.

Still, she had no control over him, he clasped the handle and pulled down.

Audrey felt the cold metal as though it were
her
hand grasping the handle. She felt herself drawn deeper and deeper into Zach’s consciousness until she couldn’t separate his thoughts from her own. She stared at the lock through the eyes and understanding of a small, very talented young boy. A boy who could do things she’d never imagined him doing.

The lock seemed frozen at first, but then there was a slight, grudging give to it, as though it were rust and not lock holding the door in place. Zach pulled it down a tad more. The scraping sound from inside the lock rattled down the dark corridor, but still the latch would not give.

He shook his head and pushed the handle again and Audrey could feel him, twisting the workings of the lock inside his mind, pushing a tumbler here—though he thought
of them as
pins—
then another. He knew where he was inside the mechanism, understood the workings of the lock, because
it made sense.
That was the only way he could think of it. It just made sense to him. But none of it made sense to Audrey.