Night Terror (39 page)

Tom turned and Virgil glanced away, not wanting to embarrass him. But Tom stopped right in front of him. “Do you think there’s a hereafter?”

“Yes.”

“You mean it? Rosie always talked about it, but she was more of a churchgoer than I am. You really believe when we die we go to a better place?”

Virgil took a long time answering. Not because he didn’t know what to say, but because he wanted his voice to carry all the conviction he felt. He stared deeply into Tom Merrill’s tear-stained eyes and nodded gravely. “Yes, Tom. I
know
we go to a better place. Doris and my little sister are waiting for me. Rosie and Timmy are waiting for you.”

He thought of the séance with Babs and suddenly he was absolutely sure that now Timmy could move on out of that dark, fearful place.

Tom bit his lip, nodded, and squeezed Virgil’s shoulder in passing.

“Just seems like so long to wait,” he said.

“Yes,” said Virgil, bowing his head in front of Rosie’s gravestone. “It seems like a long, long time.”

Chandler McGrew
lives in Bethel, Maine, and has four women in his life—Rene, Keni, Mandi, and Charli—all of whom wish it to be known that he is either their husband or father. Chandler is proud to hold the rank of Shodan in Kyokushin Karate, and is now studying Aikido. He is the author of the suspense novel,
Cold Heart
, and other soon-to-be published thrillers. Chandler can be reached at
www.chandlermcgrew.com
.

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Chandler McGrew’s gripping new thriller

THE DARKENING

Lucy

LUCY DEVEREAU SPENT HER DAYS WORMING
information out of people she didn’t believe, searching for men and women she didn’t like, for clients she tried to feel a connection with but most times could not. She existed in a constant state of tension, waiting for some unseen ax to fall, some bullet to burst through the wall of her foggy past, and blow a giant hole in her head.

That night she’d lain in bed past midnight, trying to remember why she’d watched the cable news for the past six hours. The stories were all the same, Palestinian Muslims murdering Jews, Irish Protestants murdering Irish Catholics. When sleep finally took her, she tossed and turned, dreaming of a giant blind man with rotting teeth, who chased her down a darkened street, screaming at the top of his lungs that he was God, and he had the answers.

At two A.M. men broke through Lucy’s front and back doors at the same time, the noise of the battering devices blasting through her dreams like thunder. Booted feet slapping her hardwood floors echoed down the hall. She’d barely had time to reach for her robe, when bright lights blinded her and she was whipped around and forced facedown into a mattress. Powerful hands jerked her arms behind her, binding them with something thin and constricting. A gag that
tasted like a balled sock was shoved into her mouth, so her first scream was little more than a plaintiff moan. The lights went out as a cloth sack slipped over her head, tightening around her throat. Two of her silent assailants lifted her from the bed, dragging her toward the door, where she collided with a third.

Before she knew it, she was thrown into a vehicle out front. The engine roared to life and she was pressed back into the seat, and in no time at all the car had made so many turns she was impossibly lost. Just when she was certain she was going to die from asphyxiation, rough hands untied the bag and slipped it off. She blinked and sniffled. A giant of a man on the seat beside her regarded her with eagle eyes. He wore a coal-black jumpsuit with gun belt and a large knife in a scabbard. His thick red mustache made him look like a pirate, and Lucy thought that that might be just what he was.

“You going to struggle anymore?” His voice sounded like gravel bouncing around in a blender.

She shook her head. Anything to breathe again.

He jerked the gag over the top of her head, ripping out a handful of hair along with it. She bit her lip, glancing at the cloth in his hands. It was a sock.

“We on time?” said the man, glancing at the driver.

The driver nodded.

“What do you want with me?” asked Lucy.

“The Boss wants to see you,” said the man beside her, smiling.

“Who?”

“Never mind,” said the big man, glancing around nervously.

Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.

“My name is Lucy Devereau,” she said. “I live at Forty-two Mayfield Lane. I’m a private investigator—”

“We know all that.”

“I don’t understand. I just find people’s real parents.”

“and I told you we know all that stuff.”

She shook her head. “Then why—”

“Are you stupid, or what? I told you we’re taking you to see the Boss, and you don’t want to disappoint the Boss. Do you, Frank?”

The driver glanced over his shoulder, smiling like a wolf and shaking his head. “I can guarantee that,” he said. His voice was just as raspy as the first man’s. Lucy wondered if they were on some kind of drug that affected their larynxes.

“Whoever the Boss is, I don’t want to meet him,” she said.

The passenger in the front seat frowned. “You don’t have any choice, lady. Or, at least, you wouldn’t
like
the other choices.”

The road outside was country lane, open rolling fields lit only by moonlight. The eyes of the man beside her danced from window to window like flies in a bottle. He reached across the seat and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“Pull over,” he said.

The car slowed and Lucy’s heart slowed with it. In the distance she could see the faint lights of a farmhouse. She leaned forward a millimeter and noticed a bright screen on the dash between the driver and passenger. Words scrolled along the bottom, but they seemed to be in some foreign script.

“We got company,” said the man beside her, opening his door. He stepped outside and then leaned back into the car. “Get out.”

She shook her head. Why get her
out
of the car now, in this deserted place?

“Get out,” he said. “I mean now!”

The driver and his partner slipped out of the car with a fluid grace surprising in such monstrous men. Her door jerked open, and she was dragged onto the shoulder. She struggled, but her hands were still bound tightly behind her back, and the men’s grips on her arms was as hard as steel manacles.

“Shove her under the car,” said the big man.

Ed and passenger complied. Maybe they weren’t going to kill her after all, but apparently no one cared if she was scraped or bruised. She twisted her head enough to stare back down the road, but no one seemed to be coming that way, and she hadn’t noticed any oncoming headlights either.

“I’ll do anything you want,” she gasped.

All three men laughed.

“What?” said Ed, glaring at her. “You think we want you? If we did, we’d have had you already.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she whispered, sensing the lie.

Silence from above.

In the narrow slit between the back bumper and the road, headlights suddenly appeared like a double white dawn. The trunk lid slammed shut and Lucy heard what she thought was a rifle bolt clacking into place. Ed crouched beside the rear tire, and craning her neck, she saw Frank’s or Passenger’s feet on the other side.

“Take them out,” said Ed.

The headlights grew brighter, and now she could hear the car approaching. Ed fired the rifle. Then Frank and Passenger opened up, and suddenly Lucy noticed lights approaching from the other direction. She thought she heard the tinny sound of bullets striking the car around her, the whine of ricochets bouncing off the asphalt. But that might have been only her imagination. She began to worm her way out from under the car.

Passenger was prone in the ditch, firing a rifle at the car that had stopped two hundred yards up the road. The big guy had his back to her, firing in the other direction. She rolled as quietly as possible down the incline, coming to rest on her side in the bottom of the ditch, gasping for air.

“Fuck!” shouted the big man. He was waving at Passenger and shouting for him to get her as she stumbled toward the barbed-wire fence.

Passenger took two lumbering steps toward her and fell flat on his face, blood oozing from his forehead and chest like bubbles in hot spaghetti sauce. Now Lucy
could
hear the bullets whizzing around her, and she dropped to the ground again, pressing her body into the dry grass, trying to belly-crawl under the sagging lower strand of wire as Ed cursed and crouched beside the car again.

“Get her, Frank!” he screamed over the tumult. “She’s getting away!”

“Get her yourself!” shouted Frank, pumping out round after round. The night was alive with muzzle flashes.

A barb caught on her plastic bindings, and as she shifted and twisted, the rusted metal sliced into her wrist. She cursed under her breath but kept shoving herself along with her bare feet until she was clear, struggling to her knees, stumbling to her feet, heading toward the dark shape of the copse of trees in the distance, running like she had never run before, her heart pounding, lungs stretching to bursting, afraid to glance over her shoulder lest Ed be there and drag her back to the car.

Behind her she heard someone shouting, but she had reached the trees before she realized that the voice calling her name didn’t sound like gravel at all.

DYLAN BARNES HAD JUST AWAKENED NAKED
in the foyer of his house with that weird sense of dislocation he got every time it happened. Now he moved stealthily into the living room. The barest golden moonlight stroked the floor. Deathly silence surrounded him. It was the silence that had awakened him to begin with. He’d been sleepwalking again. And like every time before, when he’d awakened, he’d known he was not alone.

Someone or some thing was in the house with him.

He centered himself, concentrating on that space in his head where the air from both nostrils came together. He could feel every drop of perspiration on his body, smell it in the air. Tuning his ears to the night, he finally discovered sounds in the silence. He could hear the light breeze outside
whooshing
around and through the eaves, the faint call of an owl, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A sudden noise behind him stilled his breathing, but it was just a creak in the old house.

He was standing
zenkutsu dacht
—his left leg extended in front of him, knee bent, his right leg behind—as he performed a slow, controlled
gedan bari.
His left fist now protected his groin and left side, his right was chambered, tucked in close beneath his right underarm.

Dylan’s fingers were long and delicate, but his knuckles were permanently swollen from years of practice on the hand boards, and the knife edge of his palm was a line of callouses, as were the balls and heels of both feet. At five foot eight, one hundred eighty pounds, Dylan Barnes was as close to being a perfect kyokushin karate machine as one was likely to find in the state of Maine, especially in a town the size of Needland.

He flipped on the light and searched the room as he had every other room in the cottage. There was no one behind the sofa or his recliner, no one hiding behind the drapes. He noticed for the thousandth time that the room needed a good cleaning, but so did the whole house. Magazines littered the floor, and he didn’t want to look into the coffee cup on the bookshelf beside him. Realizing he was now spotlighted through the window, he flipped the light off again.

He was headed back down the hallway to his bedroom, when the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. A wisp of air slithered between his bare legs, foul and dank, a breath squeezed out of the lungs of a corpse. With a brief buzzing sound like a short in the wiring, all the lights went out.

He spun, flowing automatically into
kumite dacht
—the fighting stance—his hands swirling in the fanlike stow block. He was blind, but his other senses were peaked. He tried to place an assailant’s position by the movement of air currents, listening so intently, he thought he could hear cockroaches crawling in the walls. He sniffed, catching a hint of the odor again, fetid and rank, with an almost mechanical tinge to it. He had the sudden image in his head of rotting machines, but what kind of machine did that?

His pupils adjusted slowly to the moonlight. There were ominous shadows in the hallway, but he put a name to them one by one. The bookshelf along the right wall. The phone table opposite it. The open door to the attic.

Why was that door open?

The attic was nothing but bare joists and extremely dusty, blown-in insulation. He had been up there only one time in the eight years he and Ronnie had owned the house.

There was a rusted sliding latch on the cheap panel door, and it was always locked. He slid slowly around the bookshelf, his hands still stow-blocked, ready to swing in any direction like swords. His center was tensed, but the rest of his body was relaxed, fluid.

The gift.

The thought was in and out of his head so fast, he barely had time to realize it had happened. It seemed so irrelevant to whatever was happening that he wrote it off as just one more bit of evidence of his growing instability.

By the time he reached the door to the attic he was microscopically readjusting his stance with each step, and his hands with each movement. He knew he could put his hand through the plaster beside him, crush the old wooden lath beneath, and quite possibly break the two-by-four stud beyond. But he could just as easily direct that power at a moving target, a temple, a knee, or a throat. He stepped into the doorway and stared up into the pitch-black stairwell. His mind screamed at him to close the door, slam the latch back into place, run down the hallway, out the front door. Just keep on running.

Instead, he placed his foot on the first step.

Shadows gripped his leg as though he had stepped into a deep pool of black liquid. There was a strange chill to it, something beyond the temperature of the darkness alone. He kept climbing, his left arm above him,
jodan uke
, protecting his head. His hands stayed open,
shuto
, so he could attack with the knife edge or grapple with an opponent.

As he raised his head slowly above the level of the ceiling joists, he prayed that whatever had happened to the downstairs lights hadn’t affected the wiring in the attic. The house was ancient. Maybe it was just one blown fuse. Somewhere above him hung the pull chain for the single attic fixture. He circled his arm around but felt nothing. He would have to go up another step or two in order to reach it. His hand was shaking, and he breathed deeply, forcing it to stop. Finally his fingers found the light cord and he tugged. The light flashed on and—for just an instant—the darkness seemed unwilling to die, as though it were not being overwhelmed by the electrical light, but instead was slinking away like a wounded animal.

He turned slowly on the top step, sweat tickling the notch between his buttocks. He eyed every corner, every nook.

Slowly the sense of presence receded, the emptiness mocking him. He stepped carefully across the bare joists, searching for anything that might have awakened him, that might have caused the smell. There were rat droppings on the insulation, and he made a note to buy poison, but there was nowhere for anyone to hide. The house was empty except for him. Still, he backed down the stairs, and he left the light on.

In the hallway he slammed the door, ramming the bolt into place with a finality he didn’t feel. His fingers wouldn’t seem to leave the latch, as though there were some clue embedded in its ancient paint-encrusted steel that he could decipher if just given time. Finally he stumbled exhausted back to bed, lying atop the sheets, staring at the ceiling.

Just sleepwalking and a nightmare to boot. That was normal enough.

Only it wasn’t normal.

Normal people didn’t go to bed in one room and wake up in another. Normal people didn’t imagine spooks in their house all the time, and
he
had been imagining them for almost two years now. He wondered how in the world he’d made it through the past months without being locked up.

He sighed. Karate, of course. After Ronnie’s death he’d concentrated completely on his small dojo in Needland, working out there for as many as fourteen hours a day. Training students. Instructing his assistant, Amy, in the finer points of the art, since she was preparing for her nidan test, her second-degree black belt.

But it wasn’t just the presence that kept him awake nights. It was the dreams as well. The dreams that he could never quite remember, although he knew they were about Ronnie. And now between the sleepwalking and the dreams, he was getting terribly close to losing his mind.