“Well, good.” Walker patted Rod lightly on the cheek. “And since we’ve come to such a sweet understanding, there’s something I’d like to tell you that might lighten your spirits somewhat. Would you like to hear some good news?”
Walker let go and Rod nodded again, completely unimpeded.
“The odds are highly in your favor that Tara won’t survive Monday night. If all goes well, and you behave yourself, you can have your band back. Pick your own lead singer. I’ll just manage the business, and you’ll be bigger than ever. Does that sound good?”
Rod had to agree that it did.
In fact, it was almost enough to bring back his sunshiney smile.
* * *
TWENTY-FOUR
Rod was full of shit. That was Tara’s considered opinion, though she kept it to herself. The few times that it did leak out were in the aftermath of outbursts like the one still raging downstairs. It was then that her eyes betrayed her, narrowing to almond-shaped slits of contempt; and even so, the emotion flashed and faded so quickly that no one in the entourage even picked up on it.
No one but Walker, that is. Walker picked up on everything. He knew, as she did, that Rod Royale’s dime store De Sade imitation would buy him little more than a stick to twirl on in the end. He knew, as she did, that Rod Royale was full of shit. She could see it, in the windows to his soul.
Just as he could see, in hers, that she was full of something else.
Soon, now. Very soon.
Downstairs, pandemonium reigned. Rod was babbling, Walker responding in curt, low tones. Alex was upstairs, still out to lunch. Tara wasn’t terribly concerned; at the moment she had far more pressing things to think about. She would deal with Alex herself, if it came to that.
She made her way up the winding stairs silently and stepped through the door to her suite, loosening the leather waistlet and letting the heavy dagger drop to the floor. The release of pressure from around her waist was a relief; she was lately beginning to feel very sensitive, the skin of her breasts and belly and lower back tingling in a way that was partly pleasure, mostly pain. It was a sign, unmistakably. Every fiber of her being affirmed it.
Soon.
She was fully in the room now, the scent of incense wafting up to her nostrils. A thickly pleasant smell, rich and pungent. It hung heavy in the air, soothing her.
And masking, very nicely, the taint of Passage.
The chamber was dark, lit only by the dimmest red glow of recessed lighting. It could be raised to a more workable level later, but for now it was best left low. After all, ambience was the critical ingredient, yes?
Yes, indeed. She parted the drapes that surrounded her bed and stood framed by the folds of fabric, staring into the pitch-black slit. Staring and listening.
A low moan, more a gurgling, came from within. Tara smiled, teeth white in the shadow of her face.
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “Be still.”
She shook her hair back, stretching the tight ligaments in her neck, and then crawled delicately and decisively onto the bed. Feeling the taut strands of hemp that bound the limbs securely to the bedposts. Feeling the limbs themselves, quivering against her touch like beads of mercury on a plate. Tracing them back to their juncture: torso, chill and heaving. Tight, weakly straining neck. Face, features, twisted in fractured comprehension of what lay ahead.
“Ooh, yes,” she cooed, “gonna be my baby tonight.” Tara stroked his sweat-streaked hair lovingly, fascinated by the degree of will left to this one. He’d survived the transport. It was another sign: outward affirmation of what her inner self hoped to be true. At last, she had what she needed to fulfill her end of the promise.
Another moan: this one louder, more intense. He was a bit more unstable than she’d been led to believe; it appeared as though he still wasn’t taking to the changes very well. She touched the squirming face, felt the tears tracking down each cheek. Poor baby. It all seemed so awful now, she knew. But that would pass in time, this Passage. He was Chosen. She told him that. He cried like a babe in the wilderness, not even words, just a wash of rage and anguish and despair. She understood. She cooed and stroked his hair.
And then she straddled him.
He protested weakly and to no avail. It was four A.M., after all.
Feeding time.
* * *
TWENTY-FIVE
At four twenty-three A.M. the videotape played through. The VCR, a top-of-the-line model with all the latest features, automatically zeroed off the tape and shut itself down. It left the TV—a lower-grade companion far less inclined toward such articulate self-maintenance—quietly hissing to its audience of one. There were no secret messages in that low white noise; no cryptic encodations, no masked voices. None were necessary.
He brought along his own. He carried them always.
Buried. Deep inside.
Inside, there was blackness welling up like a pool in a clogged culvert. There was the gradual slump as exhaustion and gravity pulled him deeper into the folds of the chair. Every circuit breaker in Jake’s body was shutting down, a billion frazzled nerve endings sputtering and winking into darkness.
And then, in a ragged alpha state just prior to descent into REM stage, there was the balancing act: teeter-tottering on the outermost edge of consciousness that marked his entrance to the third dream. The fight to resist it was brief and futile. In his mind he turned: screaming, scrabbling through the billowing shroud of oblivion, back towards the land of the living. In his mind, he fought: until his strength, what little remained, gave out entirely.
And he fell, screaming.
And he fell . . .
Clutching, arms flailing, he pitched downwards into the land of the lost. He landed shoulders-first with a bone-shattering crunch. The bones weren’t his; rather, they belonged to the thing upon which he fell.
It was a corpse, and an old one at that, all the juice long gone, the shell dried out and hollow as husks of Indian corn. Jake fell right in its lap. It crumpled on impact, shattering into a thousand brittle fragments; the head tipped forward, wrenched off its spinal perch, and hung suspended by a few strands of ancient neck-leather inches above his face. Its lower jaw distended in a cavernous rictus, the fleshy interior long since dried up or eaten away. Its eyes were likewise missing. But its spectacles remained: big thick lenses, cracked and bent and blasted. X-ray specs.
A spark went off behind them in the twin blackened pits. And the skull tilted toward him further as if in dimmest recognition. As it bent forward, the name tag on its musty fatigues shone black in neon uppercase stencil:
DUNCAN.
“NOOOOOO!” Jake twisted away, scuttling backwards and further into the tomb. The others were there, too: Natch and Sanchez and Claiborne and Willie from Philly and Top Six and on, all lined up against the narrow clay walls like ducks in a shooting gallery. They stirred as he crawled past, the same animate spark burning in the ruined sockets, withered arms rustling as they reached for his head, his back, his legs. Decades-old fingers snapped like kindling as they clawed at him, hissing through gaping mouths . . .
Jake’s face screwed up like a raisin under a blowtorch as the weight of the dreamscape settled upon them. “This never happened!” his mind howled. “I never found you! I NEVER FUCKING FOUND YOU!!”
He fully expected to wake up now. It was the break point: the moment of traumatic frisson that always sent him hurtling back. Semideranged, rocketing out of bed or Barcalounger, he’d wreak havoc on the waking world until the last shreds of guilt and terror evaporated. The nightmare was a recurrent pattern, a three-stage, scar-tissue-tape loop that had become his unconscious harbinger of doom. His conscious self had come to expect as much.
This time was all that, and more. This time, he couldn’t get out. This time, the dream wouldn’t let go . . .
. . . and there were more: dozens more, hundreds more in the depths. Not just his squad, but Vasquez and the brown-bar, the child and others. People he had never seen: Asian and
American, VC and GI, whole and in parts. All dead. All reanimated. Lining the winding walls, staring blindly through ghost-ember eyeholes, raising dead-branch hands to point and pull and grab. A limbless torso thrust up before him, rusted dog tags still hanging from its mangled neck. He plowed right through it, feeling it come apart like punky, worm-eaten wood . . .
. . . and Jake writhed in the chair, moaning audibly, unable to break free . . .
. . . as he slid down and down, the floor of the tunnel gone slick with viscous clotted sludge, the air choked with a hot, charnel stench. He screwed shut his eyes, he screamed and retched and screamed some more, breathing in death and spoilage and despair. And he slid, onward and downward into the esophageal blackness, the walls themselves closing in to grip and push and propel him forth, until he spilled out into a vast, cavernous space.
It was an arena of some sort: immense, circular, horribly alien, dreadfully familiar. The walls rose up in countless tiers like Gigeresque reptilian ribs: the floor was packed to capacity with the swarming, milling dunned. Five stone pillars rose up across the expanse like fingers on an enormous hand, like the points of a star.
And at the far end. squarely between the bottommost pillars, was the stage. Long, black luminescent drapes obscured it from view. The damned clustered toward it in rapt anticipation, hovering on every movement or rustle, mouths hanging open like dogs in high summer. Jake was mesmerized by the throngs, the sea of lost humanity sweeping him closer and closer to the object of his transfixion.
The long black slit in the folds of drape parted, swelled, rippled back from the stage in waves to reveal the man crucified upon it: naked, sweating limbs contorting in agony, broken wires trailing from the electrodes pasted to his shaven skull. Jake noted with horror that he sported a furious hardon. The crowd absorbed every minutae of his grotesque convolutions, feeding on the pain and anguish . . .
. . . and Jake was transported up onto the stage, alternately staring out at the Cheshire cat grin that now floated lazily above the crowd and down at the wretched form squirming away from his touch. He leaned closer, reaching down to help him . . .
. . . and the man’s head cocked up, like a crippled animal sensing danger. He was little more than a vandalized semblance of humanity: his eyes gouged out, his features twisted with pain and disfigurement, his body wasted.
But he was recognizable. Dimly, marginally apparent.
And as Jake felt the shock of cognizance, he also felt the sound welling up inside him: more primal scream than any attempt at communication. He felt it like the high-pitched whine of a turbine overloading, hot as the juncture of critical mass before the mushroom cloud, as the thing that was once Pete opened its mouth in a ghastly rasping counterpoint . . .
“NOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
. . . as the explosions blew the arena to smoking jelly . . .
. . . and the hellish grin opened wide.
And descended upon them all.
* * *
TWENTY-SIX
“God damn it,” Rachel spat. She had awakened like a shot to the moaning from below. “God damn it.” Somewhere between a hiss and a whimper.
Rachel rolled over. Her eyes trailed across the empty side of the bed and rose up to meet the moon: a pale crescent, disappearing over the Caledonia hills. The clock on the dresser said 4:37.
She cursed the empty side of the bed, her own terror. Jake moaned again, more desperate this time. It was getting worse. She could picture him, sprawled in the reclining chair, the blue light highlighting his features as he writhed at the pictures that crawled through his mind.
When the dreams came back, they were always bad, always in threes. Like the sirens of Greek mythology, luring him onto the rocks.
Rachel Adams slid out from between the sheets, padded softly and quickly toward the door. Her bowels felt icy. She brought her fingertips to her forehead and wiped away a thin coat of sweat that hadn’t been there mere moments before.
I don’t want to be afraid of you, Jake, her mind said. It was honest enough, but it didn’t change squat. The third dream was always the dangerous one, the one where whatever tormented him turned outward with a vengeance. Sometimes, it could be abated; sometimes, only endured. It had put chairs through windows and fists through walls. Once, it put him in Bellevue for observation.
Once, it put her in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s.
The scars, more than three years old, were still there; the back of her skull pulsed with phantom pain, remembering damage long healed-over and gone. When he moaned again, it was like fingernails dragging along her spine.
And that, of course, was when the baby stirred.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered. If the rest of the household wasn’t awake yet, it was only a matter of seconds. Natalie had a set of lungs that could unlace your shoes at thirty yards and a hair-trigger alarm system to match.
Jake moaned again, and that made it final.
The well-oiled hinges on the door creaked anyway as she stepped beyond them and into the hall. In Ted’s room, sheets were rustling. After all he’d been through, the last thing he needed was a psychotic episode. She would do what she could to spare him that.
At the head of the stairs was a stained glass window she’d designed, constructed, and installed. It was an unsubtle variation on the ol’ yin/yang: demon-face as the black dot on the white half, angel-face as the white dot on the black. The moonlight brought the point across, reflected it on the hardwood floor at the end of the hall. She moved toward and through the icon-light.
Then headed down the stairs.
The next time he moaned, she could see him. Her imagination had been only slightly off. He was, sure as hell, in the battered black recliner. The TV was on, the VCR was off, the dull hiss filled the room with informational emptiness. He was nearly naked in the chair. His face was contorted in plain agony.
There would be no more moaning; that phase had passed. It would be on to full-fledged screaming or violence.
Unless she stopped him in time.
Rachel’s gaze flickered down at the scars again. Automatic. Do you need to be reminded? her mind asked herself. He had bruised and broken and ripped her up unconsciously, using only his blind, bare hands. There had not been a weapon within arm’s reach. She hoped that there wasn’t one now.
Rachel finished with the stairs, made her way toward the kitchen. Upstairs a door creaked open. He didn’t stir at the sound of it. Good. The thought of getting caught within three feet of him was terrifying.
She slipped rapidly past him and into the kitchen. Like their bedroom, it was brightly moonlit. The towel and pitcher were next to the sink, where she’d left them last night. She turned the cold water on full, let it thunder against the aluminum basin for a moment, then proceeded to fill the pitcher. The noise would help him ease out of the nightmare; the water would finish the job.
She hoped.
He was halfway into a scream when Rachel reentered the living room, halted a full six feet back, and let fly. A quart of ice-cold soaring water sent an electroshock spasm through his body as it hit. He jumped, eyes snapping open, seeing nothing. His hand reached out automatically, with chilling precision, for the hilt of a nonexistent knife.
He sucked in a huge wheezing breath, eyes flicking over at his empty hand, then back. This time, there was no question that his half-crazed gaze was aimed at her. She backed away, trying to take the murderous terror and panic and rage of his expression in stride. It didn’t work. It never did. When Jacob awoke from his dreams, it could be the scariest thing that Rachel had ever seen.
Then his eyes cleared, and his expression softened, and he crumpled into himself. The leap from nightmare to Naugahyde had been broached, again. She stood firmly before him, skewered by his sight.
As the nightmare memory slipped tenuously behind.
“Shit,” he said throatily, wiping water from his eyes. His body glistened in the blue light.
“I know.” Her throat was clogged, too.
<
br /> “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” He looked up at her, his gaze appearing merely disturbed. It was a big step back from crazy. It would have to do.
Rachel stepped forward and tossed him a towel, playing it safe.
“Thanks.” He snagged and shook the towel fold-free with a fluid motion. He had remarkably articulate musculature, and it displayed itself in the gesture. She watched the way his body gleamed in the boob tube glare: cut and packed and deadly. She watched him dry off. There was silence between them. Her fingers drummed softly on the empty pitcher in her hands.
He was shaking, too. Even more than usual.
“No. It’s not,” he repeated, almost to himself. “It was different this time.
“It was worse.”
Rachel shuddered, confused. Great. What could possibly be worse?
Jake cradled his head in his hands. “I saw Pete.” He rubbed his scalp as if to massage away the memory. “He was . . . I think he’s . . . no . . . shit, it’s too weird.” His head shook vigorously. “I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“He was what?” She drew nearer, her fear receding face of her concern. For Pete. For Jake. For the mean level of sanity. “What about Pete? What did you dream?”
“That he’s dead.” He said the words without looking up.
Ask a stupid question, Rachel thought. She touched him lightly, stroking his sweat- and water-slicked hair. “Honey, it was only a dream—”
“BUT IT WASNT JUST A DREAM!” he spat.
Upstairs, Natalie let out a shriek. Ted’s door flew open; his footsteps thudded in the hall. “Mom?” he yelled.
“It’s okay, honey,” she lied. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s great,” Jake groaned. “I had to wake up the whole fucking house, too. I’m sorry.” He was serious. The dreams made him ashamed.
“I’ll go get the midget.” Rachel started toward the stairs.
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