Showdown (17 page)

She raised a hand to his cheek. “I think you're very kind, Billy.” Her fingers pulled his collar back. “You have a rash on your neck. Did you know that?”

The rash had started yesterday, but it wasn't important. What was important was Darcy.

“I think you're very kind too,” he said.

She removed her hand. Time drifted by.

She looked at the book. “What kind of story should we write?”

Billy fanned through the pages. “You want to begin now?”

“We're writers aren't we? It's my favorite thing to do. What kind of story?”

Billy thought about that.“A story about discovering everything new. Like the dungeons. Frightful truths and breaking rules.” He closed the book. “But there's other stuff to see. Let's explore first.”

Darcy walked around the sofa, mesmerized by everything she saw. “I can't believe this place has been here this whole time. It's magical. I love it, Billy. I just love it.”

“And I love you, Darcy.”

She looked back at him. “You do?”

What was he saying? “I feel like I do.”

“Well, I'm not sure I would go that far,” she said. “I'm not even sure we should trust our feelings down here.”

“But you're glad you came down.”

“Yes.” She walked toward the gate and peered back down the tunnel. “Yes, I am.”

Billy withdrew the torch and walked into the dark hall. “Let's look around.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

PARADISE

Friday morning

PAULA SMITHER awoke late in the morning, feeling sluggish, almost dead. Her mind crawled from the gray haze of another world, where it had been trapped for the last—she glanced at the clock—fifteen hours now. Eleven o'clock? What was she thinking sleeping in so late? And for two days in a row.

She slid off the mattress and walked toward the bathroom. What a dream. Wow, what a dream.

It came back to her in little chunks, and she caught her step at an image that flashed through her mind—a scene she didn't think she was capable of imagining. She lifted a hand to her stringy brown hair and ruffled it.

But it had felt so real. Not like a dream at all. More like she'd actually been there with him, letting him touch her face like that.

Amazing. Repulsive. Lovely. She didn't know which. Maybe all three.

There was something wrong with Marsuvees. Something demonic and evil and snakelike. He was finding a way to slither into her mind and whisper things that made her hate him.

Unless, of course, he was really her guiding angel, revealing her true inner self to her false outer self. Purifying her. Cleansing her with the delicious, ugly, brutal, lovely truth.

Which was what? That she wanted to be loved? That she hated herself? That she despised wickedness because she knew that deep inside her bones there was the marrow of wickedness, and the only way to deal with that evil was to draw it out of the bones?

The sword of truth was dividing bone from marrow.

She brought her fingers up to her lips and stroked them gently, the way he had.
If
he had. She turned to the mirror. The woman who stared out at her was short and pudgy. But her hair was long and her complexion shimmered in the glass, smooth and tanned from the summer sun. Her eyes glistened above a small nose. Not too bad really.

Paula looked at her body in profile, draped in one of Steve's old T-shirts. Shapely if you looked just right. At least not huge like Nancy. The one small blessing of giving birth to only one child after three miscarriages.

She moved toward the shower, keeping her eyes on her figure as she walked—no, slinked—across the room, like one of those young models walking down the street in slow motion. Paula's shin slammed into the side of the tiled bath, and she doubled over. She grasped her leg.

“Crap!”

The shock of pain brought her mind out of its lazy spin.
Listen to you,
Paula. Using language like that. What's gotten into you?

Marsuvees,
a small voice whispered.
Marsuvees Black
.

She stood up and stared at the mirror again. Another chunk of her dream came to her, the part about meeting the tall preacher in the church basement, right in her own Sunday-school room.

She looked back at her bed—the sheets had been
kicked to the floor. It was a dream. Just a dream. Still, she had no business even dreaming things like that. She'd best forget the man altogether, push him right from her mind and pretend she'd never even seen him.

Marsuvees filled in her mind's eye, blue eyes flashing.
Wanna trip like I
do, baby?
He licked his lips. She clenched her eyes and shook the vision from her head. What had become of her?

Bone from marrow, that's what had become of her.

Where was Steve? Come to think of it, he hadn't slept in their bed last night, had he? In fact, he hadn't been home for supper either, but he often ate at the bar. He hadn't bothered to call, though. He'd been gone all day, the least he could do was call. She was too preoccupied with her inner dividing of bone and marrow to worry about Steve, but now her mind buzzed with the realization that he hadn't come home. What was going on?

Paula took a quick shower, going through the routines of washing and drying, distracted by the thoughts that peppered her mind.

Steve was gone and she didn't know to where.

Marsuvees was here, in her mind, and he refused to leave.

Her memories of yesterday afternoon were fuzzy. The preacher had come to the bar, she remembered that, but her mind regarded the rest hazily. It was almost as if she'd slept through the afternoon. Maybe she had. Maybe she slept for a full day.

But that couldn't be—she remembered walking through that wind to the church and finding Nancy there, pigging out on Twinkies. Unless
that
had been a dream too. All this nonsense brought on by Black's bland, intoxicating . . . syrup.

Paula slipped into a pink shirt, ran a quick comb through her hair, and walked out into the living room.

“Steve?”

The house was silent.

And where was Roland? Heaven only knew. The boy rarely spent the summer days indoors.

“Steve!” she yelled. She walked past the kitchen to his study, which was really just a place he messed around in. Empty. She checked the rest of the house quickly, now thinking she must be missing some event that the rest of the town was attending, like another meeting at the saloon with Marsuvees. The minister. Not “Marsuvees,” but “the minister.”
Come on, Paula, get a grip.

Wanna trip like I do, baby?

She hurried to the front door, opened it, and stepped onto the porch. Dark cumulus clouds hovered low over the town, and a warm wind whipped through the trees, carrying stray leaves and dust through the street.

Summer wind. She loved the wind. Especially when the sun was out like it was now.

She glanced first up and then down Main Street. Deserted. That was odd. Paula walked to the sidewalk. She took three steps toward Nails and Tan and stopped. No, she didn't want to go to the witch's palace.

Katie might think of herself as the one woman in Paradise who really knew about life, but under all that talk she was still nothing more than a small-town girl with a broken tanning bed.

Paula turned and walked toward the church. Leaves flew by. She could barely see the church for all the dust in the air.

Wanna trip like I do, baby?

The base of her brain tingled.

That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard in my life, “wanna trip,” like I'm
some kind of druggie or something.

Then she heard the first sound of life since waking. A
thump
. Not a wood-against-wood
thump
, as if a branch fell, but a metal-against-wood
thump
. Almost a
crack.
The sound triggered a memory. Her father used to cut the heads off chickens with an ax like that. On a stump. Right through those thin necks in one blow.

She turned to her right. If she wasn't mistaken, the sound had come from behind her own house. She glanced at the church that was still swirling in the thin mask of dust, then veered toward the alley that led behind the house.

The gate to the white picket fence Steve put in last year swung in the wind. She stepped through the opening and headed for the back lawn.

The
thump
came again, closer now, definitely from the backyard, she thought. And then three times in a row—
thump, thump, thump
.

Wind banging something? But it sounded deliberate.

Paula approached the corner of the house and decided at the last minute that a little discretion might be in order. No telling what was happening back there.

Thump!

She stepped up to the gravel that surrounded the house, edged up to the corner, and peered into the backyard. The some-assembly-required shed that had taken Steve three days to assemble stood next to the back fence, its door flapping in the wind. She would have to shut that before the storm came.

An ax head rose past the shed's low roofline and swung back down, out of view.

Thump!

Someone was back there with an ax!

Paula pressed her body against the wall, out of the shed's view. Steve? Sure, it had to be Steve. Who else would be cutting wood behind their shed?

This was ridiculous. She was just going to have to walk over there and find out what he was up to, wasn't she? Paula looked around the corner again, saw that the yard was empty, and stepped out into the open.

Her first two steps were normal, but then she crouched and shuffled quickly to the shed wall without really knowing why she should feel creeped out about Steve chopping wood.

The wind moaned around the shed.

What if he catches me like this? What if Steve stands up and sees me creeping
up on him like this? He'll think I'm nuts. But what if it isn't Steve at all?
Or Roland? What if it's Marsuvees?
She froze at the thought.

That was absurd, of course. No matter how unorthodox his ways, he was a minister of the gospel. Grace and hope. Not some crazy woodsman.

The thought surprised her. Just yesterday, she was quite sure he was the devil. Now she was not only giving him the benefit of the doubt, but defending his sacred mission. Dividing bone from marrow.

She stepped forward, brought her head to the corner, and looked behind the shed. Steve knelt on the ground with a hatchet raised above his tangled dark hair. He brought the ax down.

Thump.

Paula winced. A long stake rested against the chopping block at his knees, shaved to a sharp point by the ax.

Steve was sharpening a stake. No, not just
a
stake. A dozen stakes. At least twelve of the things leaned against the fence beside him, all pointy sharp. What could he possibly be thinking, turning branches into short fat spears?

The sweaty shirt clinging to his back was the same shirt he'd worn yesterday, only now it was streaked with dried dust. His hair was matted with sweat and speckled with small woodchips.

Thump!

He mumbled something, and for a moment Paula thought he'd seen her. She eased back.

He spoke again. “Shut up . . .” The rest was lost in the wind.

What was he doing, kneeling there like an idiot, whacking at those sticks? She was half-tempted to grab him by the ear.
Get up, you useless
good-for-nothing. Get to work and make us some money or something. And
where were you last night, anyway?

You wanna trip like I do, baby?

Paula spun from the shed and ran toward the sidewalk. If the fool wanted to make tent pegs or whatever he was making back there, let him. She had this bone-and-marrow business to attend to.

The street was still empty. Dust swirls danced on the blacktop like a troop of Tasmanian devils. A thin layer of the stuff covered the street and sidewalk. She ran a finger over the top of the mailbox, clearing a swath of dust. She glanced
in, saw the box was empty, slammed it shut, and jumped at the
bang
.

Wanna trip, huh? Wanna trip?

Sure, baby, I'll show you how to trip.

Please, Paula, you're downright loose when you want to be.

Did that mean she
wanted
to be loose? Was that what her marrow was telling her?

There was something she was supposed to be doing, but she couldn't remember. Steve was back there making sticks.

“What's the world coming to?” She walked back into the house.

IF A visitor had driven through Paradise that Friday, he might have wondered if it was a deserted Colorado ghost town. So thought Johnny Drake as he stared out the front window.

If the visitor hung around long enough, he might see a stray soul or a dog braving the hot gusting winds, darting from one building to another. But in five minutes of staring, Johnny hadn't seen either. From what he could tell, the shops were closed. Their windowsills were filling with dust, and the streetlight was out. Boiling black clouds kept the valley in a perpetual dusk.

There were no visitors. Not even a lost magpie.

Johnny had awakened late, sat up groggily, and forced his mind to clear. The events of last night crashed through his mind.

Roland had agreed to come by his room when he woke up. But a quick check of his bedroom window showed no Roland.

He pulled on the same shirt he'd worn yesterday and hurried out to the living room.“Mom?”

But she wasn't there. Johnny ran to his mother's room and cracked the door. She was still sleeping under the sheets.

“Mom?”

Sally moaned, made a halfhearted attempt to lift her head, then collapsed back on the pillow.

Johnny stepped in.“Mom, wake up.”

“Go.”

The way she said it sent a sliver of fear through his chest.

It was Black's poison—had to be.

At a loss, Johnny had come here, to the front window, pulled the curtain back, and stared at the ghost town called Paradise.