My cousin had always held things inside, divulging only what was necessary. After realizing how thoroughly the wool was pulled over his trust and faith, he became even more withdrawn and prone to turn from companionship rather than to seek it. I had to admit, I liked him all the more for it. He cared enough to sacrifice a part of himself to a cause and he felt responsible for the things in his world. In my estimation, these truths made him all the more approachable. More human. I placed an inordinate amount of trust in him right from the beginning. That’s not something a Scotsman does easily. I learned that from my father, Paddy Macaulay, who only ever let a handful of men close enough to really know him.
In the Marines we called it The Nine.
“Fuck all but The Nine.
Six to carry the casket.
Two as road guard.
One to count cadence.”
I already considered my cousin part of that select group.
“You’re kind of quiet,” I said to him, just south of Wilson, Wyoming.
“Mother Theresa taught her followers that God cannot be found in noise and restlessness.”
“I guess that explains a lot.”
“How so?”
“My own relationship with the Lord. Fractured, at best.”
“I think you are closer to him than you realize.”
“Maybe.”
“The fact that you are willing to consider the possibility gives me hope,” he said.
Faith was always a tough rubric for me. I grew up as a pragmatist and a bit of a Missourian. I like the tangible. Questions with answers.
The laws of the physical Universe.
The odds at the craps table.
Divorce rates.
This belief structure based on pragmatism made the Calypso case, what we all witnessed, and more importantly the surprising claims regarding my family history, that much more implausible to the logicians in my head.
The ability of erasure our grounded mind wields is impressive.
“Define distance,” I said.
“God’s distance does not necessarily relate to our own concepts.”
“How so?”
“Everything we consider is based on our own paradigm—the lenses through which we view humanity, the Universe, even time.”
“Okay.”
“God’s view is from a vantage point of omniscience.”
“All seeing.”
“All knowing,” Meyer said, cracking the seal on a bottle of water from our ice chest. “God knows the permutations we’ve yet to consider.”
“Faith is a human construct. We define it, not God,” I said.
“Faith is a connection. It cannot exist in a vacuum. You can’t connect to something that isn’t there. Faith in another implies a relationship. It is a form of trust.”
“But what of faith—or lack thereof—in the existence of a thing?”
Before he could answer, a little girl ran from the dense pine forest, across the slight barrow ditch, and directly in front of the truck. My reactions were gelatinous, having been lullabied into apathy by several hours of Wyoming nothingness. As my foot moved instinctively to the brake, I realized there was not enough time or distance.
The mind is a funny thing. Given enough time, the brain would love to ponder such notions as a young girl having no place in the middle of godforsaken Wyoming in the middle of a Wednesday night. But in a moment of mortal decision, the mind reacts. Our nature takes control. Sink or swim. Turn or run down an innocent.
I cranked the wheel and my truck lumbered left, crossing lanes, rubber crying out against the pavement. We missed the girl, but as I went onto the gravel shoulder of the far side, the back end started sliding and caught up with the front.
I resisted the instinct to overcorrect, kept the gas pedal mostly depressed, and let the sixty mile an hour sideways power slide continue. It was our only chance, though I’m pretty sure Meyer did not understand.
As the back end began to fishtail to the left again, I eased a bit off the gas and corrected by turning the wheel right to counterbalance the inertia building in the horizontal slide. After taking out a handful of mile-marker posts, and (thankfully) meeting no new oncoming traffic, we skidded to a stop with the front tires still on the edge of the two-lane blacktop.
My heart was thudding like a bass drum in my chest and my fingers were cemented to the steering wheel. I turned to Meyer, who opened the door, leaned out, and vomited his dinner on the frigid night earth.
“You were saying?” I asked him as he closed the door and wiped his mouth.
“What…in the name…of all that is sacred…was that?” he managed.
“I have no idea,” I said, turning around to an empty road. “Where the hell is she?”
“Where is who?”
I glanced sideways at my cousin, who had obviously not fully recovered from his emasculating performance.
“Funny. You just keep wiping the bile from your chin.”
“Did you fall asleep?”
“Give me a break. No, I did not fall asleep.”
“You almost killed us.”
“I’m not in the business of running down children.”
Father West sat there in stunned silence. I now looked him full in the eyes. I saw the incredulity therein.
“You didn’t see the girl.”
Meyer just kept staring.
“She ran from the tree line. Sunday dress. White shoes. Locks of hair flying behind her. She ran like a fucking track star. What the hell are you staring at?”
“There is nothing in the road.”
“Not now,” I said, suddenly feeling stupid and distraught. Had I fallen asleep? Could I have dreamed it?
“I think we should pull in when we reach Wilson,” Meyer said. “Get a room. We’ve been on the road too long.”
I nodded, putting my truck back into gear.
What was happening to me? I was sure I had not fallen asleep, but it seemed there was no girl waiting in the road, and I doubted she would have returned to the forest (what sense would that make?).
Then it grew inside me, a realization that I’d just seen the girl we were meant to save. How exactly had I known it was her? It wasn’t possible, of course. Not really.
But that didn’t stop me from knowing it.
-CHAPTER THREE-
MY FATHER was a hero. Paddy Macaulay worked for the Denver Fire Department for thirty-seven years. He rose to the level of Lieutenant, largely on the reputation he built as a smart, tactical firefighter who saved lives and was well-liked by his own peers.
Jax and I grew up in our old man’s considerable shadow. There was not always time for the two young Macaulay boys. Paddy’s dedication and first priority was always to his smoke-eater brethren. My brother and I understood. We knew our father loved us. It wasn’t about that. He made the same facts clear to our mother when he married her; he may as well have been born into the fire department. He lived to serve his city and he couldn’t change who he was or what he believed even if he had wanted to.
I always respected him for his honesty, in part because I’d always felt the same desire to serve (though it took me some time to finally understand the nature of that calling). I don’t think Paddy knew anything about the family history—about the legends of the Clan MacAulay. If he did, he never shared it with me. When he got sick, the cancer took its time with him. He went into remission twice. I sat by his hospital bed on more occasions than I could remember. We had many chances to bring up the things that needed to be said between a father and son.
Yet he rarely spoke of our family history, and he didn’t offer any new information before he died. I’ll never know for sure what that means, but he may have been protecting me from my own destiny.
Either way, I missed him. I wanted to talk to him about all that had happened in my life since he died. We certainly could have had some deep discussions about the family genes.
Jax and my father were never very close, and they developed an eve
n more damaged relationship near the end of Paddy’s life. Not long after our mother’s death—which was almost a decade before Paddy learned of his cancer—Jax began to feel differently about our father’s professional estrangement from the family. More specifically, he started to resent the distance the job had put between Paddy and our mother.
I understood his disappointment. There were times I felt the same. Ma never stood up for herself. Rather, she chose to stand behind her husband. She never complained. And she raised us boys to be the same way. She told me once she loved Paddy with all her heart and that people don’t change. She knew who Paddy was when she married him, so she accepted the good and the bad.
Jax began to think he was Ma’s defender, I think, and so he grew more distant from Paddy as the years went on. They never really had a breakdown—only a weakening of the relationship’s structure. When Paddy died, Jax was there with him, too, so I don’t think he harbored any regret.
I understood Paddy more than my brother did because I knew I was like my father in many ways. My relationship with my own son, Cole, had been strained since he reached the teenage years. My wife, Isabel, died of cancer while she was supporting my career. I saw now that her dreams had come in second, usually relegated to the back burner. My job came first to me. Like my father. I think it was in my blood.
It therefore came as no surprise that I fell so hard for Special Agent Amanda Byrne of the FBI. In her I’d found someone who loved the job as much as I did. Two peas in a law enforcement pod. I didn’t have to worry about her cursing my dedication to my career, nor did she have to worry the same about me.
~ ~ ~
Meyer and I had settled into our hotel room in Wilson, Wyoming. The wind moaned through the valley and whipped against the side of the building, sounding as if it might shake the walls until they gave in. I had much on my mind. The girl in the road and my certainty of who she was—or at least what she represented.
“Are you all right, Mac?”
“I’ve been thinking about Cole.”
“It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons,” Meyer said.
“Marcus Aurelius?”
“Friedrich von Schiller.”
“It’s a nice notion,” I said. “But I doubt von Schiller understood the twenty-first century teenager.”
“Good point.”
“I worry about Cole. College should be a fun time. The boy has dealt with more tragedy than he should have.”
“He’s like you, Mac. He’s strong.”
“There’s a difference between being strong and being forced to be strong.”
“He’ll be all right. Are you sure this isn’t more about your relationship with your son than it is about his wellbeing?”
Typical Meyer. Cut to the quick.
“Probably,” I said. “We used to be close. Now, after last year—losing his mother and Greer…”
“Methinks thou talks more of thyself than the boy,” Meyer said.
“I need to walk,” I told my cousin.
“I need to sleep,” Meyer replied. “Go clear your head; it will do you some good. But please—do walk, don’t drive.”
I nodded and put on a light jacket. Outside the temperature was dropping fast. Thin, smoky clouds veiled the incandescence of the half moon, casting a dull glow on the land surrounding the hotel. I climbed out of the parking lot and toward the tree line, picking my way through the small rocks, twisted scrub, and up the steep grade.
The ground leveled some once I reached the stand of evergreens and I followed an old trail, away from the hotel. There was enough collateral light from the row of hotels along the main road by the interstate that I could see fairly well when my eyes adjusted. The small foot trail stayed parallel to the tree line and hotel row.
A couple of miles into the walk, I stopped to catch my breath. My lungs were attesting to the difference in altitude. I sucked in oxygen through my nose, willing my pulse to drop.
Then just as the pounding inside my ears subsided, I heard a large animal move in the forest to my right, snapping a large limb as it tried to pass. An elk, perhaps. I then heard another. And another. A herd? Unlikely this close to town, though wilderness seemed to encircle us there.
The noises grew more pronounced, less veiled. My stomach sank as I realized whatever was out there was coming for me. Wild creatures were more careful than this. The only animals that made such a racket when approaching were either unaware of the presence of others or they simply did not care. Such indifference normally implied a confidence in numbers, strength, or both. The sounds coming from inside the tree line seemed intentional. Confidently so.
Father Fic Rule stepped from the darkness directly ahead of me, along with half a dozen lesser demons on either side of him. Cruel, misshapen things. Dark as pitch; nearly invisible in the ethereal light.
Rule, who once masqueraded as a priest, believed he was indeed Satan on earth. He looked as evil and terrifying as the first time he appeared to me in my Denver home. His face and hands looked as if he’d survived some kind of terrible fire, most of his flesh having either melted away or melded with the underlying bone structure, giving him a skeletal appearance.
“You aren’t really here,” I said to him, hoping it was true.
“Believe what you must,” the gravelly voice responded. “It matters not what you think. What matters is I am who I am.”
“Have you been working on that opener since the last time we spoke? Because it needs work. More sincerity, maybe.”
“The days of smart talk and complacency draw nigh to a close, cop.”
“Now you’re sounding more like Calypso. Is he out there someplace with you, Rule?”
“They are all here with me. Your time is running out.”
“You going to kill me right here, in the middle of Wyoming? That’s not very biblical.”
“I make the times and the places. I make all you see around you. This is not your God’s world, or even your own. It is mine.”
“Fine. Do your worst. Dream or no, I’m not afraid of you. You’re a ghost. A specter of imagination. Your power can only go as far as it is given to you.”
“You cannot choose my fate,” he said. “But I shall command yours.”
“Just words,” I said. “Here are my words to you, beast: go fuck yourself.”
I turned to walk away, or wake up, whichever was next. Rule was instantaneously in front of me, as if materializing from the dew of night. He blocked my way, leering with those curled, pointed, blackish teeth.
“I could tear your soul from within. Right now. End it.”
I pressed my nose against the gnarled flesh where his nose should have been. It felt tender and cold, like hamburger just pulled from the cooler.
“Then do it,” I said. “I told you. I am not afraid of you.”
Rule raised both his arms and the throng of demons descended all around me as a crowd suddenly swells and traps one of its own. The creatures were indeed hideous, and my courage began to wane.
“With one passing thought I could release their rage; give them what they so desire,” he said, pallid eyes locked with my own. “They wouldn’t leave so much as a splinter of bone.”
“End it, then,” I said.
He lingered there, his hatred of me palpable.
And then, without a breath of sound, the horde retreated into shadow, leaving only Father Rule and me.
“Not here,” he whispered into my ear, wheezing through those mangled holes in the middle of his face. “Not until you’ve mourned the children.”
With that, he vanished, leaving me to shiver against the cold of night.
-CHAPTER FOUR-
THE VOICE had been directing Spence Grant’s actions for several months. It was difficult now, remembering when it had first begun to goad him along.
His family didn’t know, though he always suspected Gloria—his wife and sweetheart since the eighth grade—might have wondered a bit about his odd behavior in t
he days leading up to the murders.
Spence ignored the voice for more than a week. Maybe more than two. At first he honestly believed he was hearing something else. He thought he’d accidentally eavesdropped on one side of a nearby conversation, not unlike a baby monitor that picked up a stray signal. After all, it began as a whisper in the night, slightly more profound than the wind rustling a small scattering of leaves. He’d not understood exactly what was being said until a few nights later.
You know things are not as they seem.
And still he resisted. Only crazy people heard someone speaking who wasn’t there. And anyone who answered—or God forbid acted upon such ephemeral suggestion—was certifiable.
But the voice made sense; that was the rub. A lot of sense.
Things are not as they seem.
The world has gone to Hell and no one is going to do anything about it.
YOU need to do something about it, Spence.
When the voice inside called him by name, that got his attention. Spence started thinking about what the voice was telling him. He thought about it a lot. And he also started smiling at the oddest moments.
The voice spoke to him throughout the day, off and on, but mostly it serenaded him at night, in the dark, when the stresses of the day had dissipated like smoke in a stiff wind. It waited until his palate was cleansed—his canvas white and willing.
Eventually he came to covet the voice. Depend upon it. Cleave to its wonderful logic. After a time it became clear the voice was one of purpose, one of mettle. It became clear it would dictate his way forward, and Spence wanted that. He needed direction.
The first call to action played into Spence’s view of the world about him. It was necessary, the voice told him, to slake the thirst of one’s own needs.
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