Chapter 24
Tom woke up with a rosary tangled in his right fingers and his other arm draped over Cami. It was early; the first rays of daylight were coming through the windows and shining on the wall. He was dying of thirst, but he didn’t move, because he almost felt like he was on the wrong planet. He’d had one of deepest, most restful sleeps ever. His mind felt like a blank page, as if he had been sleeping as hard as Rip Van Winkle, almost as if time had gone by in years, instead of hours. He tried to remember. The rosary helped him. He looked at it as he worked backwards, ticking off the events until he got to Father Bob’s phone call, and then it came back to him in a gush like a bucket of cold water dumped over his head. He much preferred the just-awakened mind—the blank page.
How was he supposed to go back into normal life? It must go on; he knew it. He had cows to check, horses to work—yesterday he hadn’t even checked on any of the stock. He needed to irrigate the horse pasture. And now he had to worry about devil worshippers that were heavily armed and looking to take out his family and himself? It just didn’t fit. And Cami—she would want to know about everything that had happened. Had she figured out the bullets in the Jameses had been meant for them? He didn’t want to tell her what Father Bob had said about the kids. She would melt-down. Hell, he wasn’t sure, but he might be ready for a meltdown.
He slipped out of the bedroom as quickly as possible and went to the kitchen. He stood at the sink and drank three big glasses of water so fast that he had to catch his breath. Then he got the coffee going.
He concentrated on getting breakfast ready. They didn’t eat this early normally, but he wanted to see his family around the table this morning. He felt like his world was crumbling and craved some normalcy. The drifting scent of coffee brought Cami out, bathrobe on crooked, hair rumpled and pretty brown eyes still touched by sleep. “G’morning.” She smiled and cuddled into his arms. She held him for a long time, burying her head against his chest. He held her tightly to him and only let her go when she pushed back to look at his face. “How are you?”
“Fine.” He wondered why people always said that in spite of how messed up they might be—his third-grade teacher had told him people asked how you are out of politeness—they didn’t really want to hear about your problems. “I suppose I’m doing as well as circumstances allow.”
“Poor sweetheart,” she said, pulling him back into her embrace. They stood there for a long time; it felt good to be held, to feel sheltered and loved after the whirlwind of the last few days.
“Ahh—my pan’s hot,” said Tom. He released Cami and went to work on an omelet. Cami started some toast and set the table. When breakfast was ready, she brought the kids; they were rubbing their eyes but were glad to see him. Landon seemed baffled by the early hour, and Tom had to admit it felt great to turn the tables on the little brat and wake him up from a sound sleep for a change.
“Good morning, girls!” he boomed, picking them both up in a giant bear hug, rubbing his whiskers against their soft skin until they squealed for mercy and gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek.
Landon reached his chubby arms out to him. “Da! Da! Da! Da!”
Tom tossed him up towards the ceiling and Landon laughed. He wrapped his little arms around Tom’s neck and Tom held him tight, smelling his soft curls. He again felt that familiar flood of intense protectiveness and wondered at how someone could murder a little child. He put him in his high chair and began to dish up the omelet. Everyone was quiet for a few minutes while they dug in and ate.
“What’s going on today, Daddy?” Amanda asked. She was getting big enough to be a real hand and Tom was letting her ride with him more and more when they worked the cows. She was the tallest in her class and though she was a little young, he had been letting her drive the pickup down their road to the mailbox and around the ranch. Tom looked at Cami over his glass of orange juice. “Well, your mom and I are going to work on the laundry room for a little while, first thing this morning—organize it a little—and then I have a ton of work to do. You and your sister can come and help if you want.”
“Yay!” they answered in stereo. “Do we get to ride?” asked Kylee.
“Yes, ma’am.” Tom said, tipping an imaginary cowboy hat in her direction.
“But first you need to clean your room,” said Cami. “It looks like a bomb went off in there.”
“Yes, Mom.” They answered together again, sounding tired as they exchanged glances.
“And watch Landon while your dad and I work downstairs.”
“Mom! He’ll just mess everything up!” Amanda said.
“I need you to watch him for me—between the two of you, you can get both jobs done.” Cami was irritated and the girls didn’t argue further. They put their dishes in the sink and went to work on their room. Landon squalled; he wanted to go with them. Tom cleaned his face and hands with a wet paper towel and he squalled some more.
“Oh now,” Tom teased, holding Landon to him and then tickling him under the chin. Landon giggled and Tom let him down and watched him disappear around the corner after the girls.
Cami changed into some jeans and they went through the back porch door and down the basement steps. It didn’t even seem like the same place to Cami as the night the blackness had come up the stairs after her. It was just the same old basement again, light trickling in the little windows, creaky old wooden stairs, white walls that attempted to relieve the darkness of the narrow room.
She noticed some slivers of wood on the stairs and then realized the door was gone; further down, a hammer was stuck in the wall. It was a regular wooden-handled hammer that she used for driving nails, but the sharp edge was buried in a beam above her head. She tried with one hand, then two, to pry it loose. She thought about hanging from it but didn’t want it to give way.
“Let me.” Tom grabbed the hammer with his right hand, grunted, and pulled the tool. It squeaked and then wiggled free at last.
Cami looked at Tom wonderingly.
“Yeah. Good thing that it was a lousy shot.” He walked past Cami down the stairs and began to pull things out of the wall—nails, screws, safety pins, a couple of screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers. These last came out easily, and he used them to pull the deeper-imbedded items out of the wall.
Cami stood next to him looking at the debris spread into the walls. It looked like a giant porcupine had shaken his quills into the room, except his quills had been made of all the hard and sharp objects that filled the junk drawers down here. Some objects like washers and safety pins were barely stuck in the drywall and fell to the ground when she went to pull them, but others, like an eight-inch screwdriver, were buried to the hilt and had managed to hit a wooden stud. She couldn’t budge it and had to ask Tom to pull it. It took all of his force to set it to wiggle and slowly pull free. They worked in silence, slowly filling a bucket with all of the shrapnel from the walls.
Though she was silent, Cami’s brain was whirring. She was full of questions. What had happened during the exorcism? What had Tom seen? Was it gone for good? What did Tom think about the double murder? But she kept quiet. She did want to know everything, all the details; she needed to know them. But as she pulled nail after nail from the wall her dread grew deeper and deeper with each piece of shrapnel she dropped into the bucket. Cami felt her fear grow—life was not going to be the same again. Her days of ignorance and bliss were slipping away, falling to an earth of tears and blood. Her life before these past few days seemed as real as a Disney character now; there always was the other side of the coin, wasn’t there? Cami had never imagined her idyllic life torn apart by something out of a horror novel—such evil that could be felt, brazen and dangerous. It was a power that crept and slithered, raging with hate under its scaly skin—ready to strike at anyone that possessed some light. It was a something that crept on filthy claws that clicked with each step as it ascended the staircase.
Tom touched her arm and she jumped. She had not screamed, but her heart raced.
“Sorry.” Tom stroked her arm.
“Oh. It’s okay”—Cami shook her hair back from her face—“I was just thinking about this evil spirit—spirits? I just can’t believe it—you know? I mean I believed in ghosts before this happened, but all this—” She gestured at the hundreds of pieces of debris in the wall. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around it. That there are supernatural forces that could harm me or my family—that there are real people out there practicing child sacrifice and devil worship or witchcraft or whatever it is…I just—it blows my mind.”
Tom pulled Cami around to face him. “I’m sorry I brought this on us. I wish I had never gone up that mountain that day. I wish that none of this had happened. I wish …” He stopped and put his hand over his eyes. He had made a life-changing mistake and it was slowly beginning to swirl, the speed of the maelstrom picking up velocity and pulling him and his family into a downward spiral towards an unspeakable abyss.
Cami pulled his hand from his face and looked into his blue eyes. “It is what it is. I don’t think you had a choice that day on the mountain. I am with you, Tom, come what may …” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the battered walls and the disarray of the laundry room.
As they worked, Tom told Cami about his visit with Father Bob and his exorcism story about the cats. Then he talked about the exorcism of the basement, and Cami kept working, but slowed her work as she listened. Tom found the spray bottle of Holy Water he had left in the basement and showed Cami. She picked it up and held it possessively. “We’re keeping this. I want to have Father Bob refill it.”
Tom finished with the details of Father Bob’s phone call yesterday, leaving out Father Bob’s ideas of what might have happened if the murderers had the right house.
“No wonder you were dead to the world when I got home yesterday. I’ll bet Father Bob was worn out too—he’s no spring chicken.”
Tom nodded and pulled out the last piece of shrapnel, an old letter opener buried deep in the drywall. “I need to get going, sweetheart; I’m going to do a quick drive around the ranch and make sure there are no major headaches and then I’ll come back for the girls.”
“Okay, but Tom, you haven’t even mentioned the Jameses.”
“I know. I guess I’m in shock. Is there any new information? When are they having the funeral?” Tom grabbed the broom and began to sweep up a broken cleanser can and the powder that was leaking out of it. He didn’t want his face to reveal his fear.
“No. All I know is that Gwen took one of the creeps out. They say it was at close range with a shotgun. The James girls told my mother that nothing was stolen, so robbery wasn’t the motive.” Cami came over and pulled the broom out of his hand. “Go ahead and go, we can talk later, I know you have a lot to do.”
Tom looked down at her and then pulled her close for a hug and a kiss. “Okay. I’ll be back as soon as I can—call if you need anything.” He climbed the stairs two at a time, glad to get out of the house and to be alone. He had a lot of work to do, and that would give him some time to think.
Chapter 25
Weasel was still winking in and out of consciousness. His most lucid moment came when the sun was highest in the sky and the bottom of the mine shaft went from dark shadow to light shade. He could see a dark tunnel before him, leading to who knows where, and then he saw a giant rat. A cartoon rat. It was designed to be cute, but something about it chilled Weasel. It watched him with its red eyes, and then it had smiled at him and licked its giant yellow rat teeth. Weasel passed out again.
He must have only been out for a minute or two, because the light had not changed much. Turning his head as far as he could to the right or left, there was little to see. Everything was blurry anyway. Some busted timbers, broken beer bottles and beer cans with holes in them from someone target practicing at the top of the shaft, no doubt. He saw no snakes, which eased his mind a bit, but he was sure there must be spiders—big ones out here in the desert—and scorpions. What about bats? That dark tunnel looked like a great spot for bats.
Weasel sighed and dropped his head back to his Steve pillow a little too roughly. His body responded with a dose of pain so intense that he nearly shorted out again. He cried out a shout of agony and despair. He knew he was in shock, probably not far from death, but he wished he could check out now. Could hell, where he was bound no doubt, be much worse than this? He had never been one to torture creatures, human or otherwise. He knew his boss loved it, but he had always preferred the quick shot where the person never even knew what hit him. His line of work sometimes included torture, but he had always managed to run some other part of the operation—acting as lookout, driver, or gopher. The other guys never seemed to mind Weasel avoiding his share of this work—maybe because Weasel was not an intimidating torturer or maybe because they enjoyed doing his share. And now, for all his mercy and aversion to inflicting pain, he was dying a slow, merciless death alone, without even a sip of water for his dehydrated throat. He thought about putting his gun in his mouth, but it was tucked into the back of his pants, and every time he tried to move his unbroken arm behind his back, he received a melting, conscious-denying jolt of pain. How long till death? Weasel was afraid it would be later rather than sooner. Steve’s severed corpse would start to stink soon—it smelled bad now, but it hadn’t truly begun to rot. Dear God, Weasel hoped/prayed, don’t let me be around for that.
He tried arching his right arm behind his back for the gun, and this seemed to work better. He could almost reach it. His thumb and index finger touched the butt of the gun and slipped. He closed his eyes, desperately determined now, the pain radiating through him like a pulsing radio signal. He felt something close to his face. Tickling it. It felt like cat’s whiskers. He opened his eyes and saw his reflection in the giant empty red eyes of the cartoon character rat. He screamed and started—a jump that couldn’t be much as he lay there on his paralyzed side, but enough to send him out of consciousness with his mind wondering about the giant gray rat’s yellow teeth so close to his throat.
Chapter 26
Despite the long hours of the last few days and the much-increased consumption of whiskey, Father Bob woke at five as usual, a few minutes before the alarm went off, as he always did. For the first time he wondered if the bugger actually was still working and decided to stay in bed and let it go off. His mind went to work on today’s business, and slowly all of the last few days’ weirdness and violence came back to him.
He had called the bishop, who was quite excited that Father Bob had finally decided to take some time off, but considerably less excited that he wanted to take off so soon. Father Bob mentioned that he had performed an exorcism and that it had worn him out. This was true, it had been a long night, but Father Bob left out a few details, including the fact that he wanted to go to Vegas to investigate some Satanists that had rocked his little parish. Father Bob didn’t feel this was exactly dishonest; after all, the bishop was an old man with a hectic schedule and had plenty of other concerns. When and if the time was right he would tell the bishop everything. Besides, this trip to Vegas might be a real vacation if his leads did not pan out.
The James family had wanted him to perform the funeral rites for Garly and Gwen, but he had gently refused. He wanted to be in Las Vegas for the memorial of the baby killer. It had been difficult to deny them, but he fudged a little and said he was under a lot of personal strain and that the murder of two dear parishioners was too much for him—he needed time off. And it was true he supposed—at least the part about the murders; the ends justified the means. If the bishop and the James family could have seen and understood the facts as he did, they would understand his deceptions.
The alarm blared off, and he ticked the switch down and hopped out of bed. The exorcism had actually recharged him. It had been physically exhausting work and a bit mentally challenging, but it reminded him of his younger days in New York City with O’Clary. He felt silly when he thought of it this way, but he i
magined himself a marshall for God. And the cut-and-dried form of right and wrong, black and white, good versus evil of things like exorcism made him sure he was in his true place. He rarely doubted his course as far as choosing the priesthood, but he was human, the work was sometimes tedious and the life often lonely.
He had joined the merchant marine after the love of his life, a tiny, delicate woman named Silvia, died in a car accident after their third year of marriage. It had crushed him to lose her, and the isolation of the months at sea and sounds of the ocean were a balm to his broken heart. There could never be another love for him, but out there in the giant horizon of endless sea and sky he had felt God calling him. When his time was up, he moved to New York to begin his studies and become a priest. He had never dreamed he would become an assistant to one of the best exorcists in the country, let alone an accomplished exorcist in his own right, yet once he could get past the idea that the devil was real and yes, indeed, his minions were busy at work in this world, he found he had a knack for the job.
He had heard a snippet of a rock song the other day that had caught him: “Our scars remind us that the past was real.” How true that was! He looked in the mirror at the long, hooky scars that whirled diagonally across his torso. It was almost a beautiful pattern and reminded him of the ritual scarring some tribes practiced. A whirling of a six-digit claw had raked him from collarbone to waistline, not deep enough for stitches but leaving him with a terrible infection that nearly killed him. He had not been able to save Father O’Clary that day—he had been lucky to survive himself. He shook his head. Meandering over the past would not help him now.
The Sacrifice Page 11