But then her voice intruded and calmed his fears. "Nick! Thank God."
"Audrey?"
"Where were you? Are you okay?"
"Fine, fine. Sorry, I was out. Like a light, not out of the house." He felt so awkward talking to her; not since his first few dates with Sally was he this insecure. She was his agent, nothing more. And– "What is it? You sound frightened."
"Nick," she said in a toneless, professional voice which soon cracked and chipped, revealing a hidden layer of deep personal concern. "Get out of the house. Now. You're no longer safe. We're pulling you out."
He had a chilling flashback to the night outside his aunt's estate, looking up to the window to see the hitman glaring down at him.
"Where are you now?" Nick asked.
"About twenty minutes away. We're going as fast as we can, but whoever's coming after you is ahead of us. He might even... be there already. Please, Nick. Run. Hide in the woods, anything."
"Tell me," he said, "Is it Stielman?"
Silence for a moment.
"We think so. Nick, please. Take a gun and get out of there."
"Wait." He thought for a few seconds, trying to recall the drive with Stan, the trip that seemed so long ago. "Remember that fork in the road where you turn to get to my cabin?"
"Yes."
"Turn right. The sheriff said it was a dead end. Meet me there. I'll leave my car here and all the lights on, even the TV. It should buy us some time." He bent and reached for the shotgun. "Okay?"
"Dead end. Got it. Nick. Be careful, please."
"You be careful too, Audrey. I can't afford to lose my guardian agent."
He hung up and had to take a seat on the bed to fight back a nauseous spell. Somehow the impending threat faded partially in significance under the weight of a greater revelation, one that talking with Audrey had just revealed: that life continued after it seemed hopeless, that its threads might turn black for years, but the waters of time and circumstance could wash away despair in ways he never dreamed.
With a strange lightness in his heart, Nick hefted the shotgun and started down the stairs.
In the diner, Stan Michaels was having a difficult time. He was honestly trying to listen to the Reverend's words – not like Rita Morris who was sulking and slinking deeper into the well of her seat, concentrating only on her steak and eggs while her husband and Lilith sat attentively with folded hands.
Stan recalled the night he and Roger and Gary and a couple of the other guys went to Josh's new house, and rigged the satellite up to watch the Mariners. Rita and Dorothy were the only wives that tagged along. They sat in the kitchen and gabbed while the men cheered and howled in the den. He remembered it was about that time that Rita started turning away from the Lord – which was odd, because that day everyone else, including Dorothy, was drinking alcohol. Only Rita refused, and settled for regular tap water.
Stan couldn't understand it. It was just another example that the Reverend was not infallible. Stan still believed that moderate (and even the occasionally immoderate) consumption of the amber beverage did not a sinner make. But the agony in his arm surged and he had to tune out the Reverend's message – something about unity of body and of mind, and a "cleansing of the town", something the Reverend promised would begin in earnest tomorrow morning.
Stan couldn't remain in Zachary's presence any longer or the Reverend would sense his torment, would sense the thing that still writhed inside his arm, stretching, growing from the same roots he had tried to pull out last night. He felt a warm trickle drip down his wrist under the sleeve. His stomach buckled, and his dinner, now immersed in acids, leapt halfway up his throat.
The Reverend was still talking, his back to Stan. "–and Joshua Stone is but another malicious element sent by the other side to disrupt our work here. Do you think the Devil is blind to our efforts? He knows, he sees, and he has made Silver Springs his top priority."
Stan gagged and turned to the counter. The waitress shot him a look. Blinking away tears of pain, Stan swallowed the rising bile and forced himself to relax. Under his hat, his scalp was matted with perspiration, but he felt oddly cold, as if experiencing a sudden fever. Again his stomach lurched, inducing painful spasms from his wrist to his shoulder. The Reverend's speech be damned, he had to make it to the bathroom.
"–Do not be fooled by the demon's outer appearance. Joshua Stone is no writer – at least not in our understanding. I believe, dear people, that he writes with a quill dipped in blood – human blood, the blood of God's children."
Stan doubled over halfway to the restroom. His hat tumbled off his head. He reached for it, stumbled and caught himself against a cushioned stool. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the diners were still entranced with the Reverend. They stared alternately at his charismatic face and the bloody holes in his shirt. The flesh underneath was sealed, but appeared darker and lined with stringy, interlaced muscles.
Reverend Zachary again pointed to the door, through which Stan thought he could hear a man's strangled cries of demented torture. "We have seen the evidence: his 'friend' comes in search of him. And, thanks to our diligence–" he pointed to John Frakes and gave him a congratulatory nod, "the demon familiar was spotted for what he really was, revealed in his true shape."
Stan's stomach rumbled. He stared at his arm as if it were an expensive CGI movie effect; his sleeve rippled with the snakelike motions of something writhing under his skin. Through the pain, he managed to hear the Reverend's last few words.
Goddamnit, Stan thought harshly. What true shape? The guy was just a nut, come in here, probably to kill poor Josh. He pulled a gun on an innocent woman, then tried to shoot a cleric. Yeah, he was evil, but it was an evil that could be explained without simply pointing at the ground and blaming it on the Devil. There were hundreds of nuts like him running about the country. And that was why there were men like Stan, servants of the law to track them down, to imprison, and–
unghhh. Stan dropped to one knee and started to crawl to the restroom. Not too far now. He looked back.
Oh shit.
Stuart Harrelson had stepped through the shattered door. He stood behind the Reverend, arms folded, fixing everyone with his holier-than-thou gaze. He soon located Stan, crawling to get away.
Shit, Stan thought. Now he was in trouble. The Reverend's aide was coming towards him. Stan struggled to his feet. His arm was a bloated, alien limb rebelling against its host. The pain so intense he was actually able to disassociate from it. He had to make it to the bathroom, couldn't let Stuart see him like this... he'd tell the Reverend some ludicrous story about demonic possession and how Stan was lost, and... and then what?
Stan shuddered, and leaned against the wall before sliding around and pushing through the restroom door. What's happening to me?
He never thought he'd be doubting the good Reverend Bright. Never thought he'd be... afraid of him. Why, Stan had imagined himself as being one of the pillars of Zachary's model. Stan Michaels: common man with one foot in God's kingdom.
The bile surged up his throat and his head felt like it would explode. He slid to his knees in front of the bowl. Bent over and vomited up an endless, bloody mixture. When it was over, Stan slumped with his head against the mounted roll of soft paper, breathing in the dank bathroom air that had never tasted so good.
The door to the stall creaked back and two heavy footfalls announced Stuart's presence.
"Stan?"
The sheriff, holding his arm tightly, angled his head to wearily look up. "Yeah, that's me."
Stuart frowned. "What's wrong?"
Forcing a short burst of laughter, Stan weakly pointed to the bowl. "What do you think, bright boy?"
Stuart took a step back, obviously disgusted. He turned away and for a shining moment Stan actually hoped the wimp was going to puke his guts out in the sink. But he finally turned around, hands stuffed in his pockets.
"You all right, then?" He didn't really sound concerned. More let down than anyt
hing.
Stan nodded, closing his eyes. "Just a summer flu, I guess. Let me rest a bit."
"What's wrong with your arm?"
Stan's eyes flew open. He released his arm. Luckily, the snakes seemed to have subsided; he could feel them bulging under the skin like tremendous warts, waiting to burst.
"Nothing," he muttered and turned his back to Stuart. He reached over and tugged the flusher, then watched with interest the patterns formed as his puke swirled and finally vacuumed down the bowl.
Stuart left, shuffling away to report something to his master. Stan didn't care anymore. He leaned back against the hard stall. His arm throbbed with pulse of its own, a pulse that gradually moved in time with his own heartbeat. In less than a minute Stan was fast asleep, drawn into a dreamworld where he floated in frigid waters, struggling against an underwater current and imprisoned by a thick layer of ice as hard as steel.
Blood was in Lloyd's eyes, and he was grateful. It took the edge off the horrors creeping at the edge of his sight. As he struggled in the alley, crawling through the trash he had knocked over, the things came after him, their bodies mangled and burned and tortured – in the same way Lloyd had left them.
Their faces were impassive as they trudged under the dying light of an ancient lamppost. Their mouths worked, forming accusations and threats, hints at pain beyond imagining. Although they all spoke at once, Lloyd understood every one.
With a delayed shock he realized he had been carrying these crimes with him, some for at least thirty years. And now he felt their pain and horror and helplessness as he went on killing and murdering, efficiently, impersonally, for the highest bidder. He saw his first "job": the British Consul... Jacob Howe was his name, whom Lloyd had killed with a car bomb on a Sunday drive through Laos; and there was his family: two burnt, hairless little girls holding hands, his wife – unrecognizable, holding a blackened lump that might once have been an infant. Lloyd couldn't remember. He smelled their burnt flesh, tasted smoke and felt the shrapnel jutting out from their flesh. They closed around him, muttering over and over that his time had come, retribution had arrived.
Behind them, shuffling and pushing to get closer, like some desperate groupies in front of the stage at a rock concert, were two Korean political candidates. Lloyd had killed them both in their sleep, then torched their houses. Now, they were crisped, still smoldering, their throats slashed like obscene clown mouths.
Lloyd jammed his fists against his eyes and tried to crawl down the alley. He slid on wrappers, rivulets of grease, partially-eaten sandwiches and burgers, egg shells, coffee grinds. He fell onto his back and a blackened body leapt onto him, crusty fingers tearing at his eyes, nails reaching under the lids...
Sight forced back upon him. Jacob Howe was kneeling on his chest, white teeth grinning under a burnt and blistered face.
"Join us," Howe urged.
Other whispers and voices now. Hands and bodies reaching for him. Faces coming through the wall, arms and shoulders rising from the pavement. So many...
Lloyd felt himself sliding, slipping toward an abyss, a place of agony and eternal torment; and these things – victims from his past, all those he had killed – they were gleefully dragging him toward the chasm. They laughed and mocked his feeble resistance.
"Take the plunge," a woman said. Lloyd recognized her as the unfaithful wife of one of his more wealthy clients; he saw she still wore the nightgown he had killed her in. It was slit up the middle where he had cut her open and left her to die in her own guts, before taking her ear back to her husband.
"No salvation," said another man Lloyd realized as a former agent of the DEA.
Behind a wall of arms and heads, Lloyd saw the Murphy parents, still afire. Their eyes had exploded and now blackened sockets stared at him, accusing. Their lips had melted away, and now they appeared to be grinning with enormous white teeth.
All the others raised their arms and pointed, and soon Lloyd lay in the center of a ring of those he had killed. They slowly circled while the abyss yawned in his soul.
"No salvation," whispered Jacob Howe before he stood on Lloyd's chest and finally took a step off to join his family in the circle.
Lloyd covered his eyes and screamed until he was hoarse. It couldn't end like this for him, not here, not now. It couldn't... A lifetime of control and power evaporated in the blink of an eye, fading in this alleyway where he floundered in refuse, cowering before a past he had once thought to be a noble artistic achievement.
"I was just doing my job!" he screamed at them.
A murmur of laughter ran through the throng of the dead.
"Leave me alone!" he screamed, and heard another ripple of giddy chuckling. Suddenly an image rushed in and took the place of his sight: he was stalking the family of a rival Sunnis, slaughtering each son one by one, chasing them through the hills; now he recalled the last, a young man not even twenty, out of breath, kneecap shattered, his face bleeding as he vainly attempted to flee. "Leave me alone," the boy had pleaded, and then begged through blood-drenched eyes moments before Lloyd carved him up according to orders.
"Just my job..." he muttered. A series of sobs and tremors shook his body; he turned onto his stomach, covered his ears and buried his face in the trash. "No more, please..."
But the chasm grew. Endless, bottomless. A horrible stink rose from the depths.
Someone touched him gently on the shoulder.
Lloyd waited for the push. The dark abyss stretched out under his feet; the wind was cool and the air inviting. He belonged down there. The dead were right. After all, they knew him, they had been carried around with him like so much baggage over the years. They knew.
But he wasn't pushed. Instead, the firm hand lifted him out of the garbage, lifted high him enough so he could see again. See that the creatures were stepping back, disappearing into the walls, heads bowed, hands at their sides.
Lloyd blinked and rubbed the filth off his eyes. As he prepared to turn around to see his rescuer, and to thank him profusely for helping him up, he saw something that seemed out of place.
On the pavement beside the trash lay two pristine white gloves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Audrey let up on the accelerator only after she had run through the first two stop signs in Silver Springs. The town was dead. Lights were on in various homes, and the valley still gave the quaint impression of down-to-earth goodness, a place where you'd go to see the heart of America, a scenic land of simple living, hard work and moral values.
–And a lake that bestowed strange and wondrous gifts...
Audrey slowed at the light before Main Street. Agents Gregory and Allen were tucking their weapons inside their suitcoats, looking out the windows with the nondescript focus of a surveyor visualizing a minor roadway.
Gifts... Now why did she think of that particular word, and why did it stir something inside her? A burning curiosity, like a kid on Christmas morning. Whatever else would happen after this night, she had to learn what was in that lake. What made it glow at certain times? How did it sustain people who were submerged, sometimes for hours? And what did it do to them?
She found herself suddenly thinking of her father, how he often described his days on the force. He talked about his methods of crime solving, especially his questioning of suspects and witnesses. Questions, he would say, are the key, Audrey. Ask them. No matter how stupid or farfetched they seem, ask – if to no one else, ask them to yourself. He smiled at her and held out a hand – a hand that abruptly changed, withered and shriveled; a cord attached to his wrist, and he was dressed in white, reaching out to her from behind a maze of tubes and wires.
Audrey flinched. STOP IT!
She spun the wheel a little too hard, drawing angry stares from the agents.
"I'm sorry," she muttered. "My mind was somewhere else."
"Well, get it back. Now," Gregory said, rolling down his window.
Audrey was still too disconcerted by her father's vision to answer. Why
that memory now, at this time? Was it all this talk of sins and repentance...?
She brushed the thought away. She was on a job. Nick's safety was all-important. Questions about the lake and recriminations of guilt could wait – and had to, until Nick was out of danger.
Audrey slammed on the brakes, three stores before the diner. A man in a dark sweater and tan pants had materialized in front of the car. For a moment Audrey thought it was the Reverend, appearing to welcome her back...
You'll be staying a trifle longer this time, my child. Touch my hand. Your father, I think, has something he wishes to say to you…
Gregory reached into his coat, but Audrey restrained him. "No. He's a friend." Audrey rolled down the window, but Grant Wilson walked right on by, opening the rear door and sliding in beside agent Allen.
"Good evening," he announced, slamming the door. He adjusted his eyeglasses. "Mind if I tag along?"
Audrey shifted the car back into gear and stepped on the pedal. She glanced in the rear view mirror, and was almost amused at the tense scene in the back seat: Allen was regarding Grant with a curious look, meeting the librarian's unfettered scrutiny.
Grant suddenly leaned forward and spoke in Audrey's ear, loud enough that the others could still hear. "You'd have been better off without these two. One of 'em's still carrying around too much anger from his father's murder to use any common sense. The other," he motioned to Gregory. "Is too full of himself to be of any use whatsoever."
Audrey looked into the librarian's eyes, and saw a cool, calculating energy, restrained, yet budding, and potentially explosive. "Then by the same token, Grant, what good am I?" You know my sin, don't you? I couldn't kill you – couldn't do it - even when I knew it was either you or me. What good am I?
Grant's features melted, as if in reaction to the street lamps. He smiled and winked at her. "More than you know," he said and sat back, sliding uncomfortably next to Allen.
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