Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy)

by Lis Wiehl

  Dani looked uncomfortable. “I have to ask,” she said, “are these just stories, mythologies that tell a fiction, or are you saying they’re true? Is what you’ve said one out of several possible explanations?”

  Ben smiled. “I can tell you’re the kind of person who needs proof,” he said. He turned to Tommy. “Is it possible to enlarge the pictograph for a closeup? This area here.”

  He drew a circle around the two figures at the top of the pictograph representing Hiawatha and the Man of the North. Tommy zoomed in until the designated area filled the Smart Board.

  “Can you see what Hiawatha is wearing around his neck here?” Ben asked Dani.

  “A cross,” she said.

  “And here on the Man of the North, you can see the symbol of the horned helmet that the Vikings wore. In native tongue we could say it was his totem. His version of the cross.”

  He circled the symbol.

  It was the same Ѡ they’d found drawn in blood on the body of Julie Leonard.

  And the same symbol Tommy and Dani had found mysteriously drawn in the cremated remains of Amos Kasden.

  Dani and Tommy shared a glance. Julie had drawn the symbol on her own body, to send a message. Now they knew what the message was. The question remained as to whom it was directed. How the symbol appeared in Amos Kasden’s ashes was still unclear, but now both Tommy and Dani understood that if the symbol represented Christ, Amos wasn’t the one who’d tried to tell them something.

  15.

  In a small private library adjacent to the headmaster’s office at St. Adrian’s Academy, Dr. John Adams Wharton poured two glasses of sherry and handed one to Dr. Adolf Ghieri, then took the other and sat in a leather easy chair in front of the fireplace, where a small blaze warmed the room. Ghieri set his glass of sherry down, used his thumb to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe, took a long wooden match from a brass container on the hearth, leaned over to place the head of the match in the flames, and once it ignited, used the match to light his pipe. He sucked on the stem of the pipe three times, the bowl hissing to life, and puffed smoke from the corner of his mouth before tossing the match into the fire.

  “I think it’s a problem,” Wharton said. “They grow in number. Sometimes there’s strength in that.”

  “I think you’re right,” Ghieri said. “Though the greater the numbers, the greater the opportunity to sow discord.”

  “I’d hoped we could deter them when it was just the girl and that idiot athlete.”

  “I’d hoped so too.”

  “Frankly, I didn’t think she’d be so easily persuaded by his simpleminded piety,” Wharton said. “Not that I expected anything else from him, but from her, yes. I misread her.”

  “Agreed.”

  Wharton picked up a cast-iron poker and stirred the fire.

  “We’re too close to completion to let anything get in the way now,” he said. “The next few weeks are critical.”

  “Obviously.”

  “It’s equally obvious that you should not have left things to the boy,” Wharton scolded. “He wasn’t ready to improvise.”

  “Amos was a capable child,” Ghieri said. “He tested very high.”

  “Your tests are dubious at best. He was still a child. There was far too much emphasis on public display. We can’t afford to make that mistake again.”

  “No.”

  “They’re growing stronger,” Wharton said. “I’d like to know how much they know.”

  Ghieri sucked on his pipe, then blew smoke toward the hearth, where the draft pulled it under the lintel and up the flue. “Do you think they know where the book is?” he said.

  “I’m not willing to rely on guesswork,” Wharton said. “We need to get someone inside their circle.”

  “I have an idea,” Ghieri said. “I think one of them is weaker than the rest. Angrier. We can use that.”

  “Maybe it would be simpler just to destroy them all.”

  “Not yet. The information we need might be lost. I know which one is weak, and I know whom to send.”

  Wharton held up his glass to see how the crystal and the brown liquid refracted the light from the fire. He studied the flames.

  “If we can separate the two,” Ghieri continued, “the girl and her fawning little puppy, we may not need to worry about the others. They’re holding the whole thing together. The others follow them.”

  “What about the angel? Do you intend to underestimate him too?”

  “I underestimate no one,” Ghieri said. “He’s obviously fallible; he’s already missed some opportunities. We can’t let him affect us either way. We’ve dealt with angels before.”

  “Your hubris is unearned. Do what you have to do,” Wharton said, rising from his chair. “Keep me informed. Apparently I have to supervise everything. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Once Wharton left the room, Ghieri put both of his hands deep into the fire, not to warm them, for he had no need of that, but only to draw energy from the flames and bring it into his body. Wharton was still useful, Ghieri thought, but it would not be long before his usefulness ended. Wharton was a slug too stupid to know he was a slug. Ghieri looked forward to the moment when he could crush that slug under his boot.

  Dani was waiting at the curb, her view of the train pulling into the Katonah station obscured by a row of pine trees and sumac. On the town bulletin board by the stairs she saw a flier for Julie Leonard’s memorial service that someone had forgotten to take down. She saw a policeman on foot patrol beneath the streetlight at the corner where flashing red lights marked the railroad crossing, the bulge of his service automatic visible in silhouette. Before they’d caught Julie’s killer, the police had increased their presence on the street. After the case was closed, the increased presence remained, because people were still scared. Dani knew one or two policemen with guns would be to no avail in confronting the evil they faced, but if it helped people sleep . . .

  The train squealed to a stop. Passengers disembarked, climbed the central staircase from the platform to a bridge over the tracks, then descended. Dani could see first legs, bags, and briefcases descending the stairs to where she waited in a line of cars, mostly women picking up their weary husbands after a long day in the city. She watched the steady parade of stockbrokers and lawyers and investment bankers in trench coats and Burberry scarves, checking their cell phones as they chucked their Wall Street Journals into the waste bins at the bottom of the stairs. Some businesswomen too, but not as numerous as the men.

  She’d just started to worry that Quinn had missed his train when she saw him. But before she saw him, she saw the nose and the front paws and then the rest of a massive dog that dragged him down the stairs, a giant brown-and-black bloodhound with drooping flews and ears that almost swept the ground. Quinn wore the same black coat and pants he’d worn that morning, but with a black turtleneck sweater.

  He smiled when Dani rolled down the window. “This is Otto,” he said. “I told you about him, didn’t I?”

  “You did, but you didn’t say you were going to bring him.”

  “Didn’t have a choice,” Quinn said. “I had a dog sitter lined up, but it fell through. I couldn’t very well leave Otto if I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone. Is it okay?”

  The massive dog put his nose up to Dani’s open window and sniffed her.

  “How’d you get him on the train?”

  “I told them he was my smelling-nose dog,” Quinn said. “Said I was epileptic and he warns me when I am about to have a seizure. They can do that, you know.”

  “I know,” Dani said. “But I’m pretty sure the Peter Keeler isn’t going to let you have him in your room. It’s a fairly posh inn.”

  “Hmm,” Quinn said. “Well, I suppose I could always—”

  “He can stay at my house,” Dani said. “Though I’m not sure what my cat will think. He’s housebroken, isn’t he?”

  “Oh yes. I’ve got some food for him in my suitcase, but I’ll have to
get more tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t know bloodhounds could be so—”

  “Huge?” Quinn said. “He’s well above average for size. Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “What would you do if I did?”

  “Beg?”

  She popped the trunk open so that Quinn could throw his bag in. The dog filled the backseat, but he was well mannered and didn’t drool or smell bad. When he sat upright, his head brushed the roof of the car.

  As Dani drove, Quinn told her he’d given the pill sample to a lab technician at Columbia who’d promised to have results tomorrow. “I said it was something my mother was taking and I wanted to check to make sure she was getting the real thing—did I tell you she’s been making runs up to Canada to get her prescriptions filled because it’s so much cheaper there? She’s doing much better. The only side effect is that now she watches a lot of hockey.”

  Dani remembered Quinn’s endless descriptions of his mother’s maladies, real and imagined.

  “Am I going to meet the lucky man in your life?” Quinn said.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Dani said. “You probably know him. Tommy Gunderson.”

  Quinn shrugged, clueless.

  “The football player.”

  “American football or soccer?”

  “American,” Dani said. “This is going to be interesting.”

  At the Peter Keeler Inn, a fire blazed in the fireplace in the lobby. On the walls hung framed portraits of three of the inn’s most famous guests, General George Washington, General Horatio Gates, and Mark Twain. Dani helped Quinn check in, then said she’d call him tomorrow when she knew what time she’d have access to the file, either at the medical examiner’s office or the district attorney’s.

  “It sounds exciting,” Quinn said. “Like one of those television shows in which the forensic scientists sit around in exotically lit high-tech laboratories solving crimes between witticisms. You don’t carry a gun, do you?”

  “I’m an officer of the court, not a policeman,” Dani said. “Any special instructions for Bluto?”

  “Otto. Just keep his dishes full. And when you take him out for a potty stop, don’t let him off the leash because if he gets a scent, he will take off after it. They say his sense of smell is 100,000 times better than humans’, but I’m inclined to think that’s a low estimate.”

  Back in the car, Dani had to push the dog to one side to see around him as she backed up. Fortunately, he was as gentle as he was large. Before she put the car into first gear, she unlocked and opened the glove compartment. She checked to make sure the Beretta 3032 Tomcat .32 caliber automatic Tommy had bought her, a “purse pistol” he called it, was loaded, with the safety on. She’d been reluctant to accept the gift, even though Stuart Metz and Detective Casey had both suggested, independently of each other, that it might be a good idea to protect herself. After Amos Kasden had invaded her kitchen, she was less reluctant.

  “Between you and that,” she said to the dog, looking at him in her rearview mirror as she closed the glove box, “I pity the fool who tries to mess with us, to quote Mr. T. You know who Mr. T is? Of course you don’t. When I was really little . . . Look at me. I’m talking to a dog. I suppose it’s okay as long as you don’t talk back.”

  After bidding Ruth a good evening, Tommy walked Ben Whitehorse across the town green to the inn. Carl said he thought he might go for a ride before going home. Ben was oddly interested in the roofs of the buildings on the square, the church steeple across the way, the clerestory of the Grange Hall, the town hall’s clock tower. Perhaps he was a bird watcher, Tommy thought—though he believed that was more of a daytime activity. He pointed out the gazebo and told Ben that during the summer they had band concerts there, and families brought picnic baskets or bought ice cream from a truck parked in front of the library.

  “It sounds like a nice little town,” Ben said.

  “We had a pretty gruesome crime here last month. People are still checking to make sure their doors are locked. It doesn’t seem like the kind of place that Satan would pick to hang out in,” Tommy said.

  “What do you mean, ‘hang out’?” Ben said.

  “We were told this town was the seat of Satan’s throne,” Tommy said. “Maybe not this town but this general area.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “An angel.”

  “Then you should believe it.”

  “I do,” Tommy said. “You said the Wendigo came from the devil, but that nobody was telling stories about him until about a thousand years ago. When Hiawatha and Deganawida were fighting Thadodaho.”

  “Yes.”

  “So where was the Wendigo before he was here? He existed before they started telling the stories about him, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he still exists, right?”

  “He does.”

  “So where was he before he was here?” Tommy asked again.

  “He was wherever someone called him to be. Demons will come if you invite them in by name.”

  “So who summoned him here? How could the Native—how could the people who lived here already summon him, if they didn’t know his name?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “So how? Was he summoned by someone from somewhere else?”

  “I think so.”

  “Where did Thadodaho come from? You said he was an Onondaga chief—was he possessed by a demon? By the Wendigo?”

  “No. The Wendigo has its own form. Some said it was like a bird or a dragon. But there could have been other demons. Scripture indicates that perhaps a third of all the angels sided with Satan and were cast out. That’s a lot of demons.”

  “But who? Who was summoning them?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “But I think you’re asking the right questions, Thomas. Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I look forward to it,” Tommy said as he watched Ben climb the front stairs of the inn.

  Look forward . . . Tommy considered what Abbie had been trying to say when she said, “Don’t look back.” Did she mean the opposite? Look forward—be optimistic? Probably not. Another interpretation would be Look toward the future.

  He thought of a riddle he’d learned in Boy Scouts. A man is standing on the ground floor of a house next to three wall switches. One of them turns on a lightbulb in a windowless closet in the attic, and there’s no way to tell from the ground floor if the light is on in the attic. You’re allowed to turn the switches on or off in any combination, as many times as you want, but you can only go up to check once to see if the light is on. How do you solve the problem?

  He’d raised his hand almost immediately, and afterward the scoutmaster said he’d never known anyone who could solve the riddle so quickly. You turned the first switch on, left it on for ten minutes, then turned it off, turned the second switch on, and ran up to check. If the light was on, it was the second switch. If the light was off but it was still warm, it was the first. If it was off and it was cold, it was the third.

  “That’s very intuitive, Tommy,” the scoutmaster had said. Tommy’d had to look up the word intuitive when he got home, but he liked the sound of it.

  Look to the future. How far? Who knew? But think in four dimensions, not three, he told himself.

  Ruth Gunderson decided that before she closed up the library for the night, she’d check in the attic to see if the squirrels had gnawed on any of the books in storage. The attic of the old brick library was used to house the town’s historical archives and collections that had been donated or bequeathed to the library—but no one had bequeathed enough shelf space to hold all the extra books, so they sat in the attic in boxes. There’d been talk for years of expanding the building, but East Salem was not a town where anything got done quickly.

  She climbed the steep steps leading up to the attic, but when she got to the top and tried the light switch, nothing happened. There were only two bare lightbulbs illuminating the space, one directly above the st
airs and a second at the far end of the room. She thought it odd that the two bulbs had burned out at the same time, and wondered if the squirrels had been nibbling on the wires. That could be a fire hazard.

  She had a small LED light on her key chain. The battery was low and the light was weak, but she could still see ten or fifteen feet in front of her. She shone the light into the darkness and saw the shapes of a few cartons and containers in what felt like an infinite void.

  She sniffed and detected a pungent, horrible smell, as if something dead and rotting was up there. She recalled asking Leon, the custodian, to set some Havahart traps last fall, when they’d last had a problem with squirrels. Perhaps he’d caught one but forgotten to remove the carcass.

  She moved farther down the aisle, between stacks of cardboard boxes stuffed with papers and books. She’d closed the door behind her when she’d ascended the stairs, lest some sort of furry critter run out and lodge itself in the stacks downstairs, but now it occurred to her that if something happened to her up here, a broken leg or a heart attack . . .

  But she was being a timid old woman to think that way. She scolded herself for being so nervous. It was time to leave anyway—there was little she could do tonight without proper lighting. As she turned for the stairs, the battery gave out in her key chain and her tiny light died. She was in total darkness.

  “Fand!” she said, an expression her little Norwegian grandmother had been fond of saying, when Uff-da! wasn’t strong enough. She knew the stairway had to be just twenty or thirty feet in front of her, but without any way to judge the distance, she worried that she might accidentally step wrong and fall down the stairs.

  Then she heard something, a scratching sound, coming from somewhere to her left. The sound they’d all heard earlier, but much louder now. And the animal making it seemed much bigger than a squirrel.

  “Who’s there?” she said.

  No answer.

  She heard it again.

  Darn squirrels! she thought.