“This branch,” he elucidated, ducking under it as he stalked toward her, Rory in his arms.
All at once Lynn saw the light—or rather the branch. She grinned, then began to laugh.
“Mother!” Rory protested, siding completely with Jess. Jess just scowled.
It was a sturdy branch, about a foot in diameter, belonging to a gigantic pine and extending stiffly out over the path. Lynn had passed under it with a good eight inches to spare.
Jess had not.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize,” Lynn said, trying to sound contrite. A chortle spoiled the effect.
Jess’s answering grunt was a masterpiece of inarticulate skepticism.
“Mother, it isn’t funny!”
“I think it’s hilarious,” Lynn said sweetly. Turning, she began to walk again, the flashlight illuminating the path. She felt very much better in the aftermath of Jess’s comeuppance. Her lips even turned up in an occasional tiny grin.
Except for a few murmurs to Jess from Rory, nothing more was said until at last the pitted, root-choked, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t path came to an end.
Lynn stopped as the woods opened into a clearing. Three small cabins and some rusty machinery were illuminated by the ghostly light of the half-moon.
“The mining camp,” Jess said with satisfaction, walking up behind her. “We’ll stay here for the night.”
13
June 21, 1996
8:30 P.M.
THERESA’S SLENDER BODY WAS CURLED into a tight little ball, her face contorting with fear as she fought to stay calm. Elijah was whimpering in her arms. She clutched the bottle with the milk-and-wine concoction in it in one hand while she patted his back with the other and rocked frantically back and forth. He would not take the nipple, spitting it out every time she tried to get him to suck.
His whimpers were threatening to turn into a fullblown howl.
“You’re such a good boy, such a good boy, ’Lije. Such a good little boy,” Theresa crooned desperately in his ear. He was a good boy; in the real world he hardly ever cried, and down here in Hell he hadn’t done more than whimper in two days. He couldn’t betray them now. He couldn’t. She couldn’t let him.
The thought that went with that made her sick.
“Rockabye baby …”
The screaming from the rest of her family had stopped a long time ago. How long, Theresa couldn’t say. It was pitch black in the cellar, just as it had been pitch black since she had taken shelter there with Elijah, and she had no real way to judge the time. The silence could have descended two hours ago—or two days.
Silence, that is, except for footsteps and the occasional sound of something being dragged across the floor.
The silence did not tempt her to emerge from her hiding place. Not even close. There was an evil to it, that silence, that was as real and substantial as a physical presence.
Theresa knew the evil was still upstairs, just as she had known it was outside the cabin door. She knew it in her gut.
She even knew who the evil was: Death himself, come to seek them out. Which was why she had dubbed this place of her torment Hell.
“His name was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Her father quoted that verse from Revelations all the time.
Theresa shivered, from terror as much as from the very real chill. It was cold in this subterranean Hell, and it smelled of earth and rotten vegetables and the unmentionable things she had had to do in a corner. It smelled of dirty diapers and baby spit-up—and fear.
Elijah was quivering now, his knees pressing like hard, twin knots into her chest as he tried to draw his chubby little legs up to his body.
Theresa could tell what was coming: He was going to bawl.
“Lullaby, and good night …”
His stomach must hurt. He had already passed gas twice, three times. The concoction in the bottle must be hard for a six-month-old to digest.
“Hush, baby. Please don’t cry,” Theresa stopped singing to whisper despairingly to him, rocking with manic rhythm. “Please don’t cry.”
Abovestairs, the floor creaked. Death was walking again, accompanied by the dragging sound.
Elijah turned his wet little face into her neck, and howled.
The footsteps stopped.
14
June 21, 1996
8:30 P.M.
JESS CROSSED THE CLEARING toward the cabins, moving quietly, cautiously. In his arms the kid was silent, except for the incessant rustling of that piece of aluminum foil she was wrapped up in. With a brief word in her ear Jess tugged it loose and dropped it. The space blanket, with the moonlight hitting it, was about as hard to miss as a neon sign and as quiet as a drumroll.
Why didn’t they just shout that they were coming and be done with it?
An instinct honed and forgotten so long ago that he hadn’t realized he still possessed it warned him to make as little noise as possible.
Something about the dark, silent clearing was giving him the willies.
Walking a few feet ahead, her slender body practically shapeless in the bulky jacket she wore, Lynn shone the flashlight over the knee-high weeds, lighting their way. The beam had already saved them from a close encounter with a long-abandoned pick. Its once-sharp blade was dark with rust; the wooden handle looked rotten.
The uneasy feeling grew stronger with every step he took. There was nothing to account for it. Except instinct.
Over the years he had learned to trust that shivery feeling at the nape of his neck. It had saved his life more than once.
The place seemed deserted, though, just as it should be. Nothing moved. The only sounds were the usual night sounds: the quiet murmur of the wind, the humming insects, the rustling animals.
Moonlight cast an eerie but functional light over a scene that could have come straight out of the previous century. The small mining camp with its ancient equipment had to be well over a hundred years old.
Jess had visited the place before, many times over the years, but always in broad daylight.
Maybe that was it: Maybe the moonlight was to blame for the sense of dread that seemed to hang over the clearing like a pall. Wisps of clouds glowed silver at the edges as they floated across the midnight-blue sky. Mist rose from the grass, stretching upward, insubstantial drifts of white that reminded Jess of ghosts ascending to heaven. A haunting, in fact, was what came to mind as he glanced around. He had the sudden, unsettling feeling that he was walking through a graveyard.
Which was stupid, he knew, but … he couldn’t shake it.
There were enough ghosts in his past without conjuring up more, he told himself firmly.
Just then, right in front of him, Lynn stumbled, dropped the flashlight, crouched to retrieve it—and shrieked.
15
“OH, MY GOD! Oh, my God!”
Lynn was on her hands and knees, backpedaling frantically through the weeds. In front of her the body lay on its back, hands crossed between its breasts, eyes open and staring.
Lynn had never seen a sight so terrifying.
It was a woman, barefoot, clad in a pink flannel nightgown. Her hair—soft brown, and long—was braided. The braid trailed out to one side of her head like a snake twisting through the grass. A bit of pink yarn secured the braid at its end.
What appeared to be a ruby necklace adorned her throat. A wide ruby necklace, stretching like a smiling mouth from ear to ear. An oozing ruby necklace.
The woman’s throat had been slit. Lynn thought she might faint.
“Mom, what?”
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
The two startled voices close behind her brought Lynn scrambling to her feet. She bumped into something solid—Jess, holding Rory.
Thank God for Jess. Atavistic or not, she was glad of his big, strong, solid presence. Her fight-or-flight response was suddenly working overtime, with the emphasis on flight. If necessary he could stand and fight. She and Rory would run for the hills.
“L
-l-look!” she stuttered, pointing, plucking at the elbow of the goose-down jacket Jess wore.
The flashlight still lay where she had dropped it, almost on top of the body, its beam illuminating a swath from folded hands to slit throat to glassy dead eyes.
A cold chill ran up Lynn’s spine at the sight.
“Oh, my God!” Rory echoed her mother’s exclamation of horror with the same intonation. The child wasn’t her daughter for nothing, Lynn thought grimly.
“Jesus Christ!” Jess’s reaction was equally religious in nature, if a little more blasphemous.
Setting Rory on her feet, Jess moved forward to retrieve the flashlight. Lynn and Rory came together as naturally as metal shavings to a magnet, watching him. They huddled, arms around each other, Lynn taking comfort in her daughter’s living, breathing, shivering warmth.
Jess shone the light over the woman, its beam moving from her feet to her head and back. He leaned down, touched the uppermost of her folded hands, then picked up her wrist and held it for a moment before letting it fall.
“She’s dead,” he said, turning to look at them.
Duh was Lynn’s silent, idiotic response. Seconds later the gears of her brain, frozen by the shock of the discovery, began to regain some function.
“She was murdered.” Shivering, Lynn acknowledged the obvious in a weak voice. A companion realization, equally intelligent, blinked to life in her mind: “That means there’s got to be a murderer. Here.”
“Mom!” Rory whimpered, shrinking in Lynn’s embrace. Lynn’s arms tightened around her daughter. Her gaze, wide and frightened, lifted from the corpse to fearfully scan the camp.
“Jesus Christ,” Jess muttered again, shining the flashlight on something in the grass just a few feet away from the woman.
Another body, a teenage boy in jeans and a sweatshirt, lay end to end with the first. His black high-tops were less than a yard from her hair. Like the woman, he was neatly laid out, legs straight, hands folded on his chest. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.
Like the woman’s, his throat had been slit.
“Oh, my God!” This time the gasp was Lynn’s.
Jess moved, presumably to be sure this corpse was dead too. As he did, the beam picked up another shoe, another black high-top, to the side of rather than above this body’s head. The shoe had a foot in it and was attached to a leg in jeans, which was attached to a torso in a sweatshirt that was dark wet red. Thin brown hands were crossed on top of each other in the midst of the gore.
Another teenage boy, Lynn was sure, although she shut her eyes, shuddering, before the beam confirmed her guess.
This had to be a nightmare. She and Rory couldn’t really be standing in a dark field in the middle of the wilderness with three hideously murdered bodies.
Maybe she had fallen asleep. Maybe the whole unbelievable day was a nightmare, she hoped. Maybe—
A sharp intake of breath from Rory, accompanied by an expletive from Jess, popped her eyes open again.
What she saw stopped her breath, dropped her jaw, and held her momentarily paralyzed: A crude cross rising some ten feet tall had been erected about four car lengths from the bodies. The deep shadow cast by the forest’s tall trees had concealed it from their view. Now it was caught in the flashlight’s beam. A man was on it, naked and—crucified?
Blood ran in a gleaming red swath down his chest, over his genitals, down his legs. Lynn had no doubt that there was a pool of blood at the foot of the cross.
She blinked once, twice. The sight was too unspeakable to comprehend, but she had a sickening feeling that it was all too real.
“Mom, look!” Rory grabbed her arm, pointed. From the cabins emerged a trio—no, a quartet—of ghostly figures. Riveted to the spot, Lynn stared at the shimmering white shapes as they rushed toward her and Rory and Jess.
Their feet didn’t seem to touch the ground.
If they even had feet.
Talk about your ultimate bad dream.
Lynn felt as if she had stumbled into one of those children’s horror novels with the gimmicky titles that Rory and her friends were always mocking. Something along the line of Night of the Living Dummy meets Horror at Camp Jellyjam.
The only response she could summon was “Run!”
16
THE TRAPDOOR CREAKED in protest as it was yanked open. Crouched in the farthest corner of the cellar, huddled against the wall, Theresa kept her hand pressed hard over Elijah’s mouth.
Oh, no, she prayed. Oh, no, please. Save us.
A faint orangey light filled the rectangle where the door had been. A shape, like a large, indistinct egg, was outlined by the glow.
Death was peering into her hiding place.
Theresa’s fingers dug so hard into Elijah’s face that she could feel his cheekbones and jawbones through his chubby flesh. His wet little mouth fought for breath against her palm. He squirmed urgently in her hold.
Despite her best efforts to silence him, she could hear his muffled cries. She pressed her hand even harder against his mouth and felt him struggle.
Death leaned closer, seeming to look toward where she hid.
Theresa felt a warm flood soak her cotton panties and trickle down her thighs to puddle beneath her. She smelled the harsh ammonia of her own urine.
Our Father, who art in Heaven … She was too scared to think of any other prayer.
Elijah went limp.
Death moved. Theresa’s heart beat so desperately that it felt as if someone were hammering inside her chest. Her breathing grew erratic, frantic.
Death might hear it, she realized, and held her breath.
He vanished. For a long moment Theresa simply stared at the orange rectangle, empty now of all save air.
The baby lay against her chest, silent, unmoving. Theresa dropped her hand from his face, lifted him.
His eyes were closed. He hung motionless in her hold.
Elijah! ’Lije! She wailed inwardly, shaking him, trying to wake him up. He did not respond.
God forgive me, she prayed, the inertness of his still-warm little body a silent testimony to what she had done.
Anguished tears rolled down her face.
17
“RUN!” Jess yelled, echoing Lynn as he snatched up Rory, who he feared was too weak to make it under her own steam. Suiting the action to the word, he pelted toward the forest, Lynn behind him, while Rory hung down his back in a fireman’s carry, screaming like a banshee.
Even after she shut up, the sound echoed and reechoed in his ears. God save him from hysteria-prone teenage girls.
And from other scary things as well.
What he had seen before taking to his heels had left him shaken to the core: There were bodies, lots of bodies, a dozen or more, laid out in some sort of weird pattern in the weeds.
Just what that pattern was he hadn’t been able to make out.
But in its center was that guy on the cross.
What in God’s name had they stumbled onto? A mass murder, at the very least. That much was clear.
And now the murderers were after them. That was clear too.
Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time! But then that was the story of his life.
This time it might cost him his life. And Lynn and Rory theirs as well.
Rory was lying still now, her fists clenched in his coat, pulling it so tight that he could feel the zipper threatening to give. A quick glance back revealed Lynn right behind him, running like the hounds of hell were on her heels.
Which, in an almost literal sense, seemed to be the truth. Jess had gotten a look at their pursuers as they rushed through mist and shadow into the cold light of the moon. And he was stumped.
They resembled nothing human. As far as he could tell they had no faces, no features. They were just amorphous white forms, seemingly flying through the night.
He might even have allowed himself to believe they were evil spirits incarnate, except for one thing: Even as his gang of three gai
ned the relative safety of the woods, their pursuers were producing automatic weapons.
Ghosts with guns? Not in this life.
18
THE SILENCE WAS MORE FRIGHTENING than a scream. Theresa was scared to death. So scared she couldn’t move—could she?
She tried. Terror became her ally, forcing her cramped limbs to propel her in a crablike crawl over the dirt floor toward the glowing orange light that promised escape. She had only three limbs, because she kept one arm clamped around Elijah. Whatever happened she was not leaving him behind.
She could not bear to think that he was dead. Or that she had killed him.
Please, God, she prayed over and over again. Please, God, let it not be so.
She had not meant to kill him; she had meant to save him.
She had only wanted not to be killed herself. She was just sixteen! Dear God, she wanted to live!
She was afraid to die.
Death had gone. Theresa felt his absence. He was not in the cabin any longer. And he had taken his demons with him.
She hoped. No, she prayed.
As she reached the trapdoor she hesitated. Her breath rasped painfully in her throat. Tears made scalding tracks down her face. Fear almost paralyzed her. For a long, agonizing moment she huddled beneath the opening, listening.
What if Death was waiting for her up there after all?
She had to take the chance. If she didn’t, she knew that she would die here in this cold, clammy root cellar. She would die of thirst, or starvation—or Death would get her.
If he was gone one thing was certain: Sooner or later he would be back.
Looking in the cellar again.
Holding Elijah against her shoulder, Theresa gathered her courage.
“Into your hands, Lord,” she whispered finally, and giving herself up to His protection she climbed up on the crate that stood almost directly under the door. Crouching, she stared one more time up into the orangey glow.
Shadows chased each other across the plank ceiling in the room overhead. Shelves of canned goods she and her mother had put by for the winter looked eerily normal. The top of the aperture one passed through to get to the main room was adorned with a cobweb in the upper right corner. All glowed in the reflected light of the fire.
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