by Rachel Lee
Suddenly her knees turned to water and her heart stopped dead. She hadn’t even considered that possibility. Not once.
“Honor?” Ian frowned at her. “Honor, what’s wrong?”
She blinked and managed to focus on him. “I, um…I need to check the front door.”
Turning, she hurried down the hallway, not caring what he thought. She had to know if that door was still locked. She had to know the dimensions of whatever had been in this house with her.
The door was locked. She almost collapsed against it in sheer relief until she remembered the windows. Turning swiftly, she nearly bumped into Ian. He caught her gently by the shoulders.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“I…just want to check the windows. Make sure everything is locked up.” She couldn’t bring herself to look up into his strange green eyes. The compulsion to check locks was almost irrational, and completely overwhelming. Then his choice of words struck her. Slowly she raised her gaze to his. Abomination. “I’m not your honey.”
At once he stepped back, and something in his face grew tight.
Honor turned from him and headed into the living room to check all the windows. God, how she hated this room! Witch boy. The bars were all in place there and in the dining room. She wasn’t worried about the upstairs, because only her bedroom was accessible from the ground without a ladder, and no one had been in her bedroom.
Back in the kitchen, she suddenly felt as if somebody had pulled her plug. She sank bonelessly onto a chair and put her head down on her arms. She heard Ian pull out the chair across from her and sit.
And suddenly, with a crawling sense of shame, she remembered her behavior of the past few minutes, the way she had spoken to him. Oh, God, what had come over her? How could she have been so rude? She had acted like a crazy person, not like herself at all.
Slowly, reluctantly, she lifted her head and looked at him. He was regarding her remotely, much as he had the first time they met, from across a chasm of emotional distance. That look, that chilly, distant look, made her realize just how close she had felt to him earlier that afternoon. And how rude she had just been.
Lightning flared brilliantly, so bright that for an instant Ian was nothing but a dark silhouette against the kitchen window. Thunder rumbled, long and low, vibrating the table beneath her arms.
“Something…something was in here,” she said. “Before you came. I…was in the shower, and when I pulled back the curtain, the bathroom door was open.”
His eyes never flickered. Not a muscle on his face moved. She forced herself to continue, needing him to understand.
“I…couldn’t hear anyone. I ran down the hall and…hid in my bedroom. With the door closed. I…I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life!” The last words burst from her on a rising note.
Seconds ticked away in silence as he stared at her, unmoving. Finally he spoke. “What then?”
“It was gone,” she said hoarsely. “Just like that, it was gone. As if it had never been.”
Lightning flashed again, and thunder cracked deafeningly. The overhead light flickered and went out.
“Hell,” said Ian. The room was dark, illuminated only by the flashes of lightning outside.
Moments later the light flared on again. Honor stared at Ian, feeling trapped in ways she couldn’t have begun to explain, and wondering how she was going to get out of this. He couldn’t help her. He had done so much already; what more could he possibly do? What could anybody do against something that even locks couldn’t keep out?
She longed just to leave, but for financial reasons she couldn’t do that. And even the thought of turning tail shamed her. She wasn’t her father’s daughter for nothing. Face it head-on, he’d always said. Don’t let anything get the best of you.
But how could she face something she couldn’t see? How could she stand up to something she couldn’t touch? Earlier, she’d asked what a ghost could do except scare her. Now she knew that being scared was quite enough. She couldn’t live in a state of terror, and she couldn’t reason it away.
She returned her gaze to Ian’s impassive face and wondered what he was thinking. Witch eyes. Why did she keep thinking these things about him? Witch eyes. Where had that come from? And the other stuff. Demon spawn. Abomination. Lord, she’d never used words like that in her life!
She shuddered, then nearly jumped when a deafening crack of thunder sounded overhead.
Suddenly Ian reached across the table and captured one of her tightly clenched hands. “Easy, lady,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you while I’m here.”
But what about later? she wondered miserably.
The storm continued to rumble angrily without raining throughout the evening. Ian seemed to have put her rudeness behind him, though there was a reserve in his actions that had nearly vanished earlier. There was distance between them again; they were not-quite-strangers thrown together by circumstance.
Since she had so little furniture, they were essentially confined to the kitchen. Ian had brought a bottle of white wine, but she decided not to have any, because she had to go to work later. He never opened the bottle.
He offered to help with the meal, but she insisted he just keep her company. She needed to be busy, and the work was a good excuse to keep going.
“You need a TV,” he said. “Or a radio. Something to make noise in this place. And you should keep up with the weather, anyway, this time of year.”
It would probably help, she thought. It would keep her from hearing things. Just as pulling the blanket over your eyes could keep you from seeing things. As if not seeing or hearing made things go away.
Dinner was simple: steak, salad and bread. She drank milk. Ian asked for coffee. For a few minutes, things seemed normal. Almost. She wondered if anything would ever truly seem normal again.
Looking at the hard, ravaged face of the man who sat across from her, she tried to imagine the roads he must have traveled in his life. Most men didn’t stay with the Rangers throughout their careers. Most soldiers spent a few years there and then went on to join other units, where they were the seeds of a better, harder, tougher fighting force. Those who did stay were…special. Unique. The kind of men you would definitely want on your side in a fight. But not the kind of men any woman in her right mind would want to give her heart to.
They were too hard, she thought. Too toughened. Too devoted to honor and duty and country. Anything else took a decided second place. A man like that would turn his back on his own wife if ordered to. The way her father had turned his back on her mother.
Suddenly a door yawned open in the depths of her mind, and she felt herself tumbling backward into the past, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
Her father stood over her, a tall, intimidating presence in camouflage. He was big, so big, and she was small, so very small. And so very frightened.
“I told you to cut out that nonsense, Honor. You’re a big girl now.”
“Cleve, just let her be,” said her mother from somewhere behind him. She sounded worried. Frightened. “She can’t help these feelings.”
“She sure as hell can,” her father said sharply. “It’s just her imagination, and I’m getting damn sick and tired of her getting hysterical in the middle of the night because we have ghosts, for God’s sake! As long as we keep pandering to this crap, she’ll never quit it.”
“Cleve, she’s only five. She can’t help being scared.”
“But she can help talking about ghosts! She can learn to handle her fear the way the rest of us do.”
“But she’s so little!”
“And that’s the whole damn problem, Sheila! You keep excusing her because she’s so little. How the hell will she ever grow up?”
“Oh, my God,” Honor whispered, forgetting where she was, wondering how she could ever have forgotten what had happened when she was five. Trapped in a terrifying corridor of memory, she closed her eyes and remembered being locked in the closet
all night long so that she would learn to face her fears. Learn to control her wild talk of ghosts. Learn to deny what she heard, what she saw, what she felt.
Night after night after night…
Ian felt her slip away. He had resurrected his terrible talent for this woman’s sake, and it was not something he could switch on and off now, like a light. He felt her slip into her memories, and he felt anguish grip her.
And around him he felt the gathering evil. Whatever had earlier scared her was strengthening again, growing, little by little filling the house with its dark presence. Gathering its power.
He instinctively looked up, toward the ceiling, but what he felt wasn’t located there. It was everywhere, throughout this house. Thunder rolled deeply outside, and lightning continued to flicker, and even the force of the storm seemed like a small thing compared to the evil he felt growing here.
He looked over at Honor, and the expression on her face pierced him, pierced all the granite walls he had built for protection. He needed to help her. And because of his need, he reached over and touched her mind, forgetting that it was an invasion of privacy of the worst kind.
He went into the locked closet with her, and without a thought he tried to comfort the five-year-old girl who was trapped in the dark with no companion but terror.
“Oh, my God!” Honor gasped the words, and her eyes flew open. She had felt, unmistakably, a touch, an indescribable touch, in her mind. How could such a thing be? One moment she had been alone in a locked closet, reliving a horrible childhood memory, and the next she had not been alone. “Oh, my God,” she whispered again, wondering if this was what it felt like to lose one’s mind.
Ian watched her with those strange, cat-green eyes of his. He looked, she thought warily, as if he had felt something of her pain. She couldn’t stand this anymore, she realized. She couldn’t stand feeling these things and then keeping them all locked up, even if it was what her father had expected of her. Would expect of her. She needed desperately to know if someone else thought she was crazy, or sane. And Ian was the only person she could turn to.
“You won’t believe this,” she said, almost hoarsely.
He continued to regard her steadily. “Try me,” he said quietly.
But just then she felt another pressure in her mind, a dark, sinister touch, like icy, wet fingers. She shivered and looked around, almost as if she thought she could find its source. And then she looked into Ian’s eerie eyes. Spawn of demons. Witch boy. How could she trust him? she wondered wildly. What if he was the evil thing she felt?
Abomination.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Ian said suddenly, harshly. “I’ll drive you to work.”
She was startled, and the icy touch in her mind vanished. “But I don’t have to leave for an hour yet.”
“Good. We’ll stop and get coffee someplace. We need to talk. There’s…there’s stuff I need to tell you.”
A touch of stubbornness flared in her. “I thought we talked earlier.”
“That wasn’t everything. There’s more. A lot more.”
She opened her mouth to argue that they could talk right here, but before the words escaped, she felt it again. The presence. The dark thing that loomed in this house. It was strengthening. Growing.
She had to get out of here. Now.
She looked at Ian. “I’ll get my stuff.”
At the foot of the stairs, she froze, not wanting to go up there. Ian was suddenly beside her, touching her elbow. How did he know?
“I’ll go up with you,” he said. “You don’t have to face it alone anymore, Honor.”
Face what alone? she wondered. And wondered even more at the way his words dovetailed with the memory from her childhood. Her father had insisted she face it alone. Ian said she didn’t have to.
It was all too weird. No one would ever believe…
At the top of the stairs, she looked back at the dark, hard man who followed her so protectively. He would believe her, she thought.
And she wondered why that thought didn’t comfort her at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lightning flickered among the trees as they drove down the two-lane highway toward town. Pines and oaks crowded the shoulders of the road, dark shadows in the headlights. It was a relief, Honor thought, to be away from that house.
A half-hour later they reached the edge of town and Ian pulled into the parking lot of a brightly lit all-night hamburger place. Air Force uniforms were visible at a number of tables. A couple of guys in Ranger uniforms nodded to Ian as he guided Honor to a table in an out-of-the-way corner.
People. Normal, ordinary people. How wonderful they looked after a day like today.
“Coffee?” Ian asked. “I’ll get it.”
“Please. Black.”
There was something so wonderfully normal about this place, the bright lights, the gleaming floors, the buzz of quiet conversation, that the past couple of days seemed like a movie nightmare. Almost.
When he returned with the coffee, Ian slid into the booth across from her.
“How are you going to manage to stay awake all night?” he asked her, surprising her. “You’ve had one long day.”
“I’ll be okay. Adrenaline usually does the trick.”
“I’ll come to get you in the morning. Seven-thirty?”
Honor nodded. “I might be a few minutes late, though.”
Ian shrugged. “No big deal.”
A few more minutes passed while they sipped coffee in silence. Finally, looking about as happy as a man facing a firing squad, Ian came to the point.
“I don’t want you being alone in that house anymore.”
The first thing to hit her was a tidal wave of overwhelming relief. Then reality intruded.
“I can’t afford to move out,” she said flatly.
“I realize that. What we need to do is see if we can’t get rid of this…whatever it is. There’s got to be some way to fight it. Exterminate it.”
She thought of the movies and spoke the word with difficulty, rebelling at the whole idea. “Exorcism?”
A strange thing happened then. It almost seemed to her that Ian’s gaze slid away, as if he were uneasy with the subject. As if the word had struck him personally somehow. And that brought the rumors about him being a satanist racing to the forefront of her mind.
“No.” He said it sharply, flatly, in a low voice, a commanding voice. “No. Don’t even think that.”
“What? Think what?”
“That I’m afraid of an exorcism.”
“I wasn’t—” She broke off, realizing that she had been on the verge of thinking exactly that, that a satanist would be terrified of such a thing. “What the hell do you do? Read minds?”
His mouth compressed into a tight line. “I’m not afraid of it,” he said, ignoring her question. “I’ve been through it.”
Through it? He’d been through it? She sank back against the vinyl-padded bench and just stared at him. In all honesty, she wouldn’t have guessed that anyone in this part of the world could even perform such a ceremony. And certainly not that someone she knew might actually have been through it.
“Why?” she said finally. “When?”
“When I was a kid,” he said. The words came roughly, as if they were extremely difficult to force out, but his face never changed. “I was just six. Mrs. Gilhooley—the woman who lived in your house—had a goat. Damn animal was as old as Methuselah. Anyhow, I told her the goat was going to die. I don’t even remember why I said it. Probably because it was so old. And damned if the goat didn’t drop dead on the spot.”
“Oh, my,” Honor breathed, finding it not at all difficult to envision the progression of events. Just imagining it made her ache for the boy he must once have been.
“Mrs. Gilhooley accused me of witchcraft or being possessed or something,” Ian continued. “I don’t remember much of it very clearly. The preacher performed an exorcism on me. I mainly remember being locked up for days while
people prayed and sang over me. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink, and sometimes they’d slap me silly, trying to drive the demon out.”
He shrugged again, as if it no longer mattered, but Honor wasn’t quite buying that. “How awful,” she said softly. “Why would she ever accuse you of something like that? You were just a child!”
A child who saw things he shouldn’t. Who heard the thoughts of others. Ian looked at her, but he didn’t answer, because if he told her why Mrs. Gilhooley had hated him so much, she would be scared to death of him. And that wouldn’t help at all right now. Instead, he lied by omission. “I don’t remember much about the whole thing…except you’ll never persuade me that exorcism is worth a whole lot.”
She guessed she could understand that. For a moment she simply sat and looked at him, thinking that they both had childhood scars. It made her feel closer to him. “Did they think they had cured you?”
“For a while, at any rate.” He picked up his cup and sipped. “Something like that sticks with you. Like the smell of skunk. When folks think you were possessed once, they’re always on the lookout for it to happen again.”
Honor nodded. “That must have given you a rough time for years.” Even as she spoke, she realized that for him it had never been over. Just today the electrician had brought the subject up again, even though more than thirty years had passed. “Why did you come back here, Ian? Some of these people…” She hesitated. “Well, some of them evidently haven’t forgotten.”
His eyes bored into her. “It’s my home,” he said.
Honor shook her head slightly. “Being an army brat, I’ve never felt that way about any place. And I don’t think I’ll ever get to feel that way about this place. I like what you said about getting rid of this—this whatever-it-is—but how can we possibly do that?”
“I don’t know yet, but I intend to find out. I’m going to check out the base library this morning. If they don’t have anything, there’s an occult bookstore downtown.” One corner of his mouth lifted a little, just a faint suggestion of humor. “Maybe all we need is a garlic necklace.”