"Talitha...sent?" she asked aloud to the building. "Who am I?" Her mind wavered in confusion. Was she the other Talitha? The evil one? She didn't think so, yet her memory was definitely of forcing the good Talitha into the crypt where the teeth came alive? She could picture that girl even now, she looked so innocent, so fearful and so weak.
"Will...I'm having problems. I...I...I don't think I can go down there."
"Tal..." Will had a pained expression. "Time's running out, we got to do this, how about I hold your hand? Will you be able to come down then?"
She didn't want to go down there regardless, the many teeth of Jubal kept flashing anew in her mind, but she had no choice and took his large hand in her small brown one. They descended quietly for a time before she caught the scent of the police officer who had been in Father Alba's room at the hospital. She remembered his name was Milner and she remembered as well throwing him about a small white room. She had made him look weak and pathetic, and he had cringed, practically in tears when she looked his way.
The one thing she couldn't recall was when any of that had happened.
She didn't dwell on it, however, the thought of Milner was too distracting. There was something about him that she found terribly annoying. He was irritating like an itch you couldn't scratch and his voice had the quality of nails on a chalkboard. Quickly all thoughts of the crypt of Jubal vanished, they were buried beneath a growing anger. The anger simmered rapidly into hate. It was a warm feeling, one that made her forget her worries and fears. Hate could conquer all of that nonsense; it could conquer anything. Talitha knew this. She remembered now how weak and frail she was without it and she allowed herself to be engulfed in its powerful arms.
Chapter 9
Will
The little room hadn't changed. And neither did Will's reaction to it. When he entered he gave it a quick glance and a familiar depression settled onto him. Other than the remains of the fire the gypsy had built the night before, the room was furnished solely in contemporary American death.
"Father Vogel, I hope that you're just about finished down here," he said, checking his watch, feeling a flight of humming birds swarm for a brief moment in his chest. Their plane would depart in one hour and two minutes.
"Yes, I am. However, I still have some more questions, but they can wait until we're on the plane." The priest answered in an amiable manner. His tone was light and it didn't go with the morbid surroundings.
Will didn't relish the idea of any more questions. He was sure that they would only set Talitha off again and that was something he couldn't afford, at least not yet. His main fear was that if the evil Talitha came out too many more times, she would be impossible to contain.
Eric Milner was in the room as well, weaving a beam of light around. He stood in a long grey coat, bundled against the chill, wearing a glum look on his face, shaking his head at all of the bodies. "Will, I'm really gonna need my gun back now. You aren't going to be able to get them on the airplane you know."
Will shrugged, knowing the man was right, and held out the weapon. "Keep it out of sight will you?" A gun in his hands was another thing that could set his sister off, her other self seemed to hate the cop with a dreadful passion. Will sighed heavily, not knowing how he was going to keep Talitha together long enough to overcome Amy.
"Mr. Jern, where is your sister?" the priest asked, his own flashlight he sent shining past Will. "I have some questions for her as well.
"Huh? Talitha is right..." Will turned around, his sister was nowhere in sight. A burst of fear went through him that he tried to ignore and he put his head out into the dark hall. "Talitha?" he called out to her, hoping that she'd only stepped out for some air. He was getting nothing in the way of a vision and had no idea what was going on in her mind. "Talitha!" This time he yelled louder, but the building felt empty.
"It's ok Mr. Jern, it can wait," Father Vogel said, before heading for the door. Will grabbed him quickly by the arm and spun him around, putting his finger to the older man's lips. Will then pointed to the two men and then pointed to the floor. Stay here, he mouthed. The priest looked surprised at the hard look on Will's face, but complied. Milner was another story.
"Oh shit!" The cop, who had just put away his gun, yanked it out again and held it at arm's length, his face looking as grey as his coat. With his free hand, he produced a second gun. It was the one that Talitha had shot Will with the night before. "What's going on? Is that bitch sister of yours going psycho again?"
"She can likely hear you," Will replied quietly. Milner's face went white. "I really don't know what's going on, it could be nothing whatsoever. She could be outside getting some fresh air, or she could be wandering around the building. All I know is that she was right next to me when I came in. But all the same, I'm worried. Talitha has been acting a little odd."
He paused, unsure how much to tell them. If he told them too little, he could be putting them in danger if the evil Talitha was really back. If he told them all that he knew and suspected, the cop would likely shoot first and ask questions later. It would mean putting Talitha in danger and he didn't know if he could risk that, he needed her too much.
"What do you mean by odd?" Milner hissed.
"She has been acting...only for very short periods, mind you, kinda like her other self. You know, a little violent, a little weird."
"Mother fucker, you can't be serious!" Milner reacted just as Will had feared. The guns were trained on the door and he was sure that the cop would shoot at the first sign of movement in the hall.
"Aren't we being a might bit paranoid?" the priest whispered. "Would she really attack us? Three grown men, one of whom is a police officer?"
Milner looked at the priest as if he was an idiot. "No disrespect Father, but we weren't lying about this girl. She's freaking possessed! I told you how strong she was, and you heard Sean's story. There were six men in that room beneath the church and even though she was unarmed and blind, she managed to take two of them hostage. And you saw how big Sean and Jim was! They ain't no tiny guys."
The priest considered for a moment, stroking his grey goatee. He turned to Will. "You were rather certain that you had exorcized the demon in her. What has changed?"
"Honestly I don't know. It started this morning, but it got really bad only an hour or so ago, when we came here. She acted a little distant, kind of spacey you could say, and I figured it was due to seeing Jim. They liked each other quite a bit." Will paused as Milner gave a contemptuous snort. He sent the cop a hard glare before continuing, "So we were all standing here looking at the bodies and the next thing I know she takes off and runs out into the rain. She started talking about having memories from the other Talitha coming into her head, but I think it is way more than that."
"More than that? What the fuck does that mean?" Milner asked. His fear and anger battled to turn his voice into a whine. "And what are we supposed to do? Just sit here and wait to see which freaky girl shows up."
Will didn't know. If the evil Talitha was controlling her as he suspected, then to go out into the dark factory where shadows ruled, would be suicidal. He shrugged.
For a long while, none of the three men budged. They all stood staring at the door, beyond it was only the blackened wall of the corridor. The iron haired priest showed his light in its direction, working the tight beam around the edges of the doorway. Other than soot-covered sludge, it revealed nothing.
Will checked his watch and what he saw made his chest tremble, time was now clicking by in hurry. "We should go back up to the street."
"No way, I'm staying put." Milner stepped further back from the door as if Will was going to drag him upstairs with him. "She could be anywhere out there, waiting to drop a desk on our heads or something."
"Fine. I'm going up. Give me one your guns," Will demanded, holding out his hand. The gun that Talitha had taken from Jackson had been thrown into a dumpster on the way to the factory.
"Hell no!"
The response w
asn't unexpected. Milner feared Talitha and for very good reason. "Do you want me to fix this? I can't do it without a gun. You..."
A great crash from somewhere in the building echoed down to them cutting off his words. It was so loud that Will wondered if part of a wall had fallen in.
"Perhaps she tripped?" the priest suggested. He seemed extremely unperturbed, which was quite the opposite of Milner who shined with sweat and backed further away.
"Talitha doesn't trip. Ever," Will replied truthfully. "That sounded like that might have been part of a wall coming down." The three men looked at each other uneasily. "I think we all should go up."
Milner looked unconvinced. "It wasn't that loud. It could have been anything, or maybe she's just trying to get us to think that..." Another crash came, this one closer and to their right. For a few moments the three men stood breathing lightly, trying to listen past the steady monotonous dripping of rainwater seeping down from the ruined roof of the factory.
"I do believe she may be trying to trap us down here," the unflappable priest said calmly.
"Can she do that? Aren't there a number of ways to get out of here?" Milner asked. At one time, the factory had been large, running over a football field in length and stood three stories high. After the fire, however it was hard to judge what percentage was still standing and impossible to know how much of the labyrinth like lower floors were still intact.
"There can't be too many ways out," Will replied searching his memory. "Part of the lower basement, near the center is actually open to the sky and if we can get to that it would only be a matter of climbing out. That being said, I do think we can be trapped and maybe easily since so many of the corridors down here are already blocked. Some of the upper floors have collapsed onto them." Will began to think that the day before, Talitha had done perhaps too good of a job at destroying the factory.
"Crap," Milner muttered. He held out one of the black pistols to Will. "Let's get outta here. Take this... you should go first. Since you can see the future. Father you go next, I'll take the rear."
"What an interesting predicament," Father Vogel announced nodding his head in agreement with his own words. "Mr. Jern, would you like my flashlight?"
"Thanks." With the gun in his right hand, Will took the light in his left and shown it at the empty doorway. "I'm afraid if the demon is back, interesting wouldn't be the word I'd use. Now, stay close, both of you."
"Well it's interesting to me," Vogel explained as they began moving toward the door. "The life of a priest can be somewhat routine."
Will paused at the doorway, shining his light back and forth a moment. It was an eerie sight. Fire and water appeared to have warped the building. In places the walls sagged as if they bore far too much weight, in others, great cracks ran up them to the ceiling where large chunks of wood and cement had fallen in. The concrete floor was cracked and buckled as well and everything was blackened and tortured looking. It gave him a nasty thrill to see the place like this, knowing that evil lurked in it just it had the night before. His stomach knotted, but the priest seemed so calm that Will was a little embarrassed. He put a little more bravado in his voice.
"Routine? I would think that as an exorcist you'd lead a pretty exciting life for the most part."
"It can be, but..."
"Will you two stop talking for Pete's sake?" Milner interrupted hissing out the words. "Your freak of a sister could be sneaking up on us right now."
Will glanced back, but the man was barely visible in the odd shadows made by the two flashlights weaving about. "She could be, and if she were I really doubt that we would hear her, but I'll be quiet. You need to stay closer Milner, try not to leave such a gap."
The cop was a good nine or ten feet away. Too far in Will's opinion. After Milner closed the gap, Will started forward again, but hadn't gotten far down the sludge-filled corridor when he came to a great tumble of charred beams blocking the way they had come. It was a new cave in and it forced them to turn around.
For the next ten minutes, the three men moved down different corridors trying to find a way out. Sometimes they ran into natural dead ends, as a number of the halls would suddenly open onto large storage rooms and at other times damage from the fire stopped them. Each time they were forced to turn about retracing their steps in the black muck.
It was after their fourth such turn that Will saw a clear set of tracks running down another gloomy hall. The shoe prints were quite small. Excitement grew in him and he realized then that in the back of his mind, this is what he'd been after all along. He still needed his sister. Getting out of the building and going to Maine alone had been his last resort.
He set off following along after the tracks, moving slowly and as carefully as possible, shining his light into every room before progressing. Like Milner, he was afraid that his sister would try to collapse a ceiling onto them and thus he paid particularly close attention to the roof above their heads. And more than a few times, he felt a peculiar tingle as he stepped beneath what looked like an avalanche of precariously balanced wreckage.
The others followed, close in the case of the priest, while Milner hung back. The beam of light coming from the cop's shaking hand jittered about. Sometimes it would shine ahead of Will and then at the slightest sound it would disappear into the gloom behind them. This constant motion of the man's light only made seeing into the shadows harder, making them seem to grow or move.
Will knew they were in an impossible situation, his gut told him that Talitha hadn't run away, and that the footprints they were following after wouldn't lead to a way out. She was there in the building, somewhere up ahead, plotting. After a few minutes he began to distrust the tracks they were trailing—she had to know how obvious they were. It was almost as if she wanted him to find them and follow after. Although he didn't have one, he wished he had another choice. The imprints went steadily without deviation except for when they came to a door to a room. At each of these, they turned and Will could picture his sister peering in before moving on.
She was after something. A weapon perhaps. He picked up the pace hoping to find her before she could find what it was she was looking for and soon he made the mistake of barely giving each room a glance as he passed them. The hall they were traversing came to an intersection of another hall and without warning, the tracks disappeared as if Talitha had suddenly grown wings and had flown from then on. Will cast his light down both directions but where there should've been marks in the soot, there was only what looked like black carpet greeting his light.
"Look at this," Father Vogel pointed to the wall at Will's right. There was an odd smearing of the soot on the wall and Talitha's small handprints were clearly visible. It looked as though she had been wiping away the grunge to see beneath it, but there was nothing there to see. It wasn't like her. She wouldn't casually mark up the wall like that, there was a purpose to it. But what that purpose was, he couldn't figure out until a vision came to him a second later.
A second too late.
Chapter 10
Will
With the charring and the coating of dark ash, the room was blacker than night ever could be. Suddenly the wall to the left of the door appeared to grow eyes. They blinked once and then shown steadily with an unhealthy evil light. Around the eyes a face, also blackened by ash seemed to form from the shadows, and then beneath that a body materialized as if from nothing. The creature, all the color of pitch save for those fiery eyes, stepped forward soundlessly, moving toward the door, moving to where beams of light danced about as if in play.
"Milner!" Will snapped his head back and screamed at the cop. "Behind you!"
He was too late and Milner too slow.
The cop's light seemed to leap from his hands, spraying the hall with radiance and shadows. There was a flurry of movement and grunts and then Eric Milner was gone, pulled into a room by what appeared to be a shadow that had come alive. Sluggishly, as if the flashlight weighed many pounds, Will turned his light down the
hall and saw little but a jumble of footprints on the floor as if a waltz had been danced there. Shocked by the rapidness of the attack he stood listening, breathing heavily, with Father Vogel a step in front of him doing the same thing.
But then he saw.
Will knew what was coming, but for half a moment his mind was too disorganized to act. A bullet was going to come screaming out of the dark straight down the hall, centered dead on the chest of the priest in front of him. The man would fall back into his arms knocking the two of them over and there he would be lying in the dark with a dead priest draped over him, protecting him...just like yesterday... just like yesterday. It was an echo of déjà vu.
And so close was this coming moment to the dreadful one of the day before that Will's mind was nearly paralyzed with confusion. Was that horrible scene going replay itself once again? Was it a bizarre reverberation of a past event haunting him or was this real? Questions flashed through his mind, but his left hand cared nothing for them.
The flashlight fell forgotten from his hand and began a slow motion spin to the ground, casting strobes of light down the hall. That left hand, now free, shot out and raked furrows into the skin on the back of Father Vogel's neck, as Will's nails dug in to gain a purchase on the man's tight collar. With his grip firm, Will's left foot planted and he pistoned outward with the great muscles of his thighs, sending both him and the priest hurtling in a dive toward the junction of the two hallways.
Down the corridor, light blazed for an instant and then a huge flat crack, like sharp lightening, erupted. Will landed in the sludge and slid, not knowing if he or the priest was hit by the bullet. Another flash lit the hall and this one seemed altogether silent save for the hiss of a hot angry bee zipping by his neck.
The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set Page 81