“You might want to take it,” Jeff Dean says. “And when you do, make sure to put it against your heart.”
“Why?”
Jeff Dean shrugs his shoulders. “Just the way it’s done, amigo”. Jeff Dean’s face swells suddenly into a vast and yellow smiley face that dances with glee. “The way it’s been done since the beginning of time. Florida dreams, that’s what it’s all about,” the dancing face says. “Florida dreams. Jeff Dean’s the name, surveillance is the game. Don’t forget about that. Don’t ever forget about that. Not much escapes the ole’ surveillance machine. I can see right through suitcases. Shit, I can see through pillows. I’m the freakin’ tooth fairy. So, I think it would be very wise if you kept your seatbelt fastened, old buddy. Something tells me it’s gonna get a little bumpy up here in a few minutes.” Suddenly the huge and gleeful smiley face begins to decompose before Doug’s eyes. The grinning skull loses its flesh and melts like hot wax, the eyes dissolving like bloody snowballs, running down the waxy cheeks in two reddish-yellow streaks.
Back across the aisle the old priest grins at him, but the smile is not one of glee, instead it is one of elemental agony. His gums are black now, and green teeth protrude crookedly from them, like ancient moss-covered tombstones. “You must take it,” he rasps, “or forever be doomed. It is the only way.”
Doug looks from the old man to pie-eyed Annie and feels the terror in his heart. “There’s something on this airplane,” Doug says suddenly. “A bomb, maybe.”
“No, not a bomb,” Annie replies, but suddenly her voice is not Annie’s anymore. Now it is the voice of Lucy Ferguson, the woman in the airport restroom who is soothing him as he dies. “It’s something new, something different, and quite invisible to scanners. Christ, the tooth fairy can’t even see it.”
“Take it,” the old man says, thrusting the artifact at him.
“What is that thing?” Lucy Ferguson asks.
“A magic talisman,” Doug replies. “It has no will of its own but contains a shit-load of power. It’s the tip of the spear that pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion. The one who possesses it controls the very fabric of nature. Isn’t that just my luck? To be entrusted with something like this. Me of all people. A carpenter from Maine. Christ, I’m not even close to a holy roller. Haven’t been inside a church since my parent’s funeral when I was twelve years old.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the old priest says. “It was meant for you and your child.” The priest urgently shakes the artifact in his face and Doug can hear the faint tinkling of metal on metal as the chain rattles against it. Finally Doug reaches out and snatches it.
“Around your neck!” the old man says. “Quickly! It needs to be against your heart.”
“But I already have one of these—”
“No, she took it from you after you were murdered.”
“Who took it?”
“I did,” said the voice of Lucy Ferguson. “Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“It needs to be around your neck,” insists the old man. “Hurry, it will give you new life.”
“Impossible. Once you’re dead you don’t get a ticket back.”
“This is your ticket,” says the priest. “Now quickly, before it is too late.”
Doug hesitates only a split second longer before he hangs the chain around his neck.
The old man crumples back into his seat like a deflated balloon; it is as if a tremendous weight has been lifted from his shoulders. “There,” he says. “It is done. Now I can finally rest in peace.”
Doug looks to his right and Lucy Ferguson is staring at him as if he’s lost his mind.
The airplane rocks suddenly and dangerously. There comes the sound of a muffled explosion from somewhere below deck. Passengers scream and a huge rent opens up in the side of the aircraft right beside Lucy Ferguson. Doug feels his seat settle slightly, and his heart leaps into his throat. The aircraft rocks again with a secondary explosion and the crack widens into a gaping fissure. He can see white puffy cumulous clouds hurtling by within an arm’s length. A high shrill whistling sound comes from the opening and he realizes that it is a combination of engine noise and pressure escaping the cabin. Then the window pops out and Lucy Ferguson gives him a grim look. She reaches out to grasp his arm but it is too late. Her seat vibrates, breaks loose and is sucked up and out through the opening, taking Lucy with it. Lucy, still strapped to her seat vanishes into an endless abyss of blue sky.
The cabin suddenly fills with noxious smoke, people choking and coughing but mostly just screaming. Pressure rushes out, carrying with it everything that isn’t strapped down. Oxygen masks fall from overhead compartments and people are grabbing for them and placing them against their faces. Flight attendants are screaming for people to buckle their seatbelts, to stay calm while they themselves are filled with hysterical emotion. Luggage and clothing fly toward the opening. Doug ducks down in his seat in order to avoid being struck by a flinging missile. Objects whiz by his head like speeding bullets and exit the aircraft like gas escaping a deflating balloon. The pressure leaving the cabin is pulling severely on him. He realizes that it’s a miracle he wasn’t sucked out of the aircraft along with poor Lucy Ferguson. Or had it been Annie? No matter. This is all a bizarre dream anyway. A dead man’s dream. Other passengers haven’t been as fortunate; screaming and flailing some fly toward him. He ducks as they slam into the row of seats in front of him before being propelled out through the opening. Bodies slam into the side of the cabin; some at odd angles bent and broken, some folded like rag dolls. Doug hears bones crunching and sees trails of blood chasing after the unfortunate doomed.
The plane slips sickeningly to the right and goes into a dive. Doug can see bits and pieces of earth through scudding clouds, perhaps twenty thousand feet below. A whirling laptop computer strikes Jeff Dean in the neck like some macabre Frisbee. His huge yellow smiley face head lifts cleanly off its shoulders and rolls down the aisle like an errant wheel before being lifted up by the sucking air and propelled out through the gaping fissure. A stream of yellow blood follows the smiley face, tracing a line along the top of the seats and splattering onto Doug’s shoulder and the side of his face.
The ground is closing fast. The airplane is rocketing toward earth at an insane speed. Doug knows that when it strikes, the destruction will be catastrophic. Everyone and everything will be instantly vaporized into atoms before being incinerated in a 20,000 degree furnace of misting fuel. Suddenly he has an idea. What the hell, he thinks. I’m dreaming all this anyway. Dreaming or dead, or both. I’ve got nothing to lose. The ground is closing like an express train and the airplane is coming apart at the seams, burning and roaring like a meteoric locomotive.
Follow your heart.
By now most of the passenger’s screams and dreams have been silenced either by smoke or lack of oxygen. They’ve either passed out or died. Doug figures this is probably a good thing.
He is glued to his seat by the gravity of at least a dozen atmospheres. He finds it very hard to move. He feels himself losing consciousness, choking on the noxious smoke. He struggles to stay awake. He feels an insane calm come over him and chalks it up. He’s calm because he’s dreaming, of course. Or dead. Or both. Doesn’t matter which. The important thing is none of it is real. So he watches almost reverently as the ground rushes up to meet him.
He moves his hand in an agonizing effort to grasp the clasp of his seat belt, pulls. Nothing happens. Not surprised. Dreams. You can’t trust them. He pulls on it again. This time it comes loose. He crawls toward the opening like a bug on a wall. Centuries pass. Everything is glue, but he’s not worried. He’ll get there in time. In dreams as in death, time distorts. A minute can stretch into an eternity; a million years go by in the wink of an eye.
As he is thinking these thoughts the sucking air picks him up and propels him out through the opening in the fuselage. He slams against a jagged shard of torn metal and feels an ugly pain erupt in his chest. A
nd then he is outside the aircraft. He is floating. The tail section whizzes past, the horizontal stabilizer missing him by a hair’s breadth before it breaks off and glides away like some warped and distorted version of a sail plane. The fuselage is now a nose-heavy bomb, no wings, no tail, and like a bomb, it falls swiftly toward the earth, a free-falling missile of almost certain destruction.
In sharp contrast to what he is seeing, or what he thinks he is seeing—curiously, Doug feels like he weighs nothing. He seems suspended in mid air. He watches the bomb full of shattered dreams descend into the forest, leaving him far behind. Impossible because Newton proved five hundred years ago that all objects, regardless of weight and mass are subject to the same laws of gravity. They’re supposed to fall at the same rate. But it seems those laws do not apply here. They only make sense in a rational universe. The universe Doug is occupying at this particular moment in time—dead, dreaming or both—seems to have taken a permanent leave of absence. Nevertheless, he watches horrified as the airplane-turned-missile slams into the forest and explodes in a massive burst of white light, blinding him like a photoflash as all sensory perception ceases.
And he knows nothing more for a very long time.
Chapter 44
Annie sat in silence inside the jet cabin as it raced through the night sky. She stared out the window into an unyielding wall of darkness as almost ten years of her life dissolved before her eyes. It was past midnight, April 22. Numb and unable to weep, she was trying to sort out her emotions. Yesterday, she had received word that Doug’s flight had crashed. In a state of shock she’d watched the news of the crash unravel on television. Her father had sat with her watching the reports, showing no emotion. News copters filming the crash scene from above showed nothing but a black and smoking stain upon the earth. Reports said that the destruction had been so great, there was little identifiable left in the wreckage.
It had not been Doug’s original flight, Annie had been informed. There had been some sort of mix-up with the flights and he’d been put on a later flight, the one that had subsequently crashed. Simple coincidence had been Doug’s undoing. It was true, hard as it was to accept.
With a shiver she thought of Doug, of those last impassioned hours before he had gone out of her life. He’d stood above her bed as she’d feigned sleep. She’d been unable to acknowledge his imminent departure from her life. It wasn’t because she didn’t love him—she did, desperately—it was because she’d learned long ago how to construct walls around her heart. It was the only way she could summon the strength to let him go.
Now he was gone, and the heart inside the walls was shattered. There was nothing more for her to do but grieve. Yet a crazy logic that she could not adequately articulate told her that somehow, all of it made some sort of perverse sense.
A voice spoke to her from somewhere deep inside her walled heart. It wasn’t Doug exactly but it reverberated with the resonance of his spirit. Please, Annie, the voice said, get away from your father before our child is born. It is very important that you do so. Don’t try to puzzle it out, just do it, any way you can.
She sat waiting for the voice to continue, but of course it did not. In that moment she’d been listening to her own heart, not the voice of her dead husband. She breathed out a shuddering sigh as she lay back in the darkness and pulled a blanket around her, for she felt a death-like chill despite the warmth of air inside the jet.
But as much as logic tried to impose its will upon her, she could not deny having truly believed, that for a fleeting moment, she had heard Doug’s voice.
The pain Annie felt was a sworn enemy that was yet her only friend and her oldest acquaintance, the ruler of a prohibited domain inside her. Hours passed as she lay clutching the blanket, oblivious of the airplane cabin around her, her father beside her, troubled by thoughts too confused to articulate, thoughts whose only common denominator was loss.
When dawn was a patient red glow on the eastern horizon, dreams, the gatekeepers of exhaustion, intruded upon her troubled sleep. But before her mind took total leave of the sad waking world, it was greeted by a thought that comforted her and seemed to open a tiny door at the far end of some distant but tantalizing possibility.
The vigil she had just endured was not without its ironic end, for inside her womb lived the final player in the drama of their lives, the child that would carry the story forward.
Yes, she would find a way out of this mess she’d made of her life. She wanted to turn to the man beside her and accuse him; was he guilty of the crimes her heart suspected but wanted so desperately to deny? And then came a question far more compelling than all the others; was he responsible for her mother’s death? Had he so carelessly cast her aside in his bid for immortality? Annie realized that the exercise was futile. She did not have the strength to ask such questions, or worse, to face their answers. It’s why she had run. It’s why she would run again. She would never be as strong as Édouard De Roché, no matter how hard she tried; he would always wield some sort of perverse influence over her life.
But now I have something I can use against him, she thought. I have what he wants, what he needs, something he will do anything to possess. It is my only power against him. When I am strong again I will take it from him just as surely as he took what he took from me.
The jet sped onward into the coming dawn.
Chapter 45
The memorial service was held on the Thursday following the crash. There was nothing substantive to grieve over, nothing to touch or to look upon, as though the man Annie had known and loved had been a rumor, and all of this formality was merely theater. Four players becoming three, three becoming two, and then one, until the stage was empty . . .
The service was held in Doug’s hometown Congregational church. Friends and acquaintances attended in droves. Doug had no family. He was the last of the breed, so to speak, an only child of an only child. His mother had had a twin sister, Tessa, the woman who’d raised him, but she’d never married, and she’d died of cancer while Doug was still in college. There would be no more McArthurs. Annie sighed at the realization. But at that moment the child within her gave a strong kick, as if reminding her how wrong she was.
Daddy and his entourage accompanied Annie to the service, which was lovely, befitting for a man who had been loved and respected by many. There were lots of tears and hugs, exclamations of sorrow and words of hope and salvation. Although Annie appreciated the kindness, she could not make sense of it. There was no sense to be made of her life now, only contradictions. There hadn’t even been a house to come home to, that gone just as surely as Doug was gone, her life here wiped clean like it had been a chalk drawing at the whim of some macabre eraser.
There were droves of reporters outside, vying to get in, but security was tight and people with cell phones and cameras were not allowed in.
Throughout the service Annie sat, stood, nodded and smiled politely, looking but not seeing, listening but not hearing, touching but not feeling. When it was over she knew that her life here in Doug’s world was over. She had been here because Doug was here, no other reason than to be with the man she loved. Now, without him, it all seemed somehow absurd, as if none of it was real. Not this place, not this life. The friends and acquaintances she’d made as a result of Doug were now little more than cardboard characters, actors in the drama of their lives, leaving the stage for the final time.
Later, at the reception, Rick Jennings approached Annie and her father.
After Annie had introduced the two men Jennings asked if he could have a word with Annie in private.
“Of course,” De Roché said, stepping away, looking pained. He went to where Theo and Greta stood at the refreshment table and began talking in a low tone.
Jennings embraced Annie, and it was the first time that Annie had allowed herself to cry since she’d learned of the tragedy, breaking into sobs so deep and painful that Jennings thought she might break in his arms. “I’m so sorry, Annie,” Jennings sa
id to her. “I don’t know what else to say. I loved Doug like a son.”
“I’m still trying to accept it, Rick,” Annie sobbed. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“Annie,” Jennings said gently. “There are some things I need to discuss with you.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, we didn’t exactly leave town quietly.”
Jennings nodded. “That’s part of it, but there’s more.”
Annie stared.
Jennings said, “I know that you and Doug were being pursued on the morning your house was destroyed.”
Annie nodded.
“Doug called me from the airport on the morning of the crash.”
Annie closed her eyes as a sob shook her. Jennings saw that she was incapable of speaking.
“He told me everything, Annie,” Jennings said. “He told me about the baby, his fears about your father. He said he had a strong premonition . . .” Jennings hesitated. “I think he somehow knew he was doomed, Annie.”
“I knew it too, Rick. God, I knew it, and I could have kept him but I didn’t. I let him go. Does that make any sense?”
“I don’t know, Annie.”
“Maybe I’m some kind of . . . monster?”
“Annie, don’t do this.”
“I can’t explain it,” Annie said. “It was almost like I couldn’t help it.”
“It only reinforces some of Doug’s suspicions.”
“What do you mean?”
“He believed your father was using some sort of mind control on you.”
Annie searched Jennings’ face for a long moment, knowing that he was right but knowing also that it did not matter. She was not strong enough to resist De Roché’s control. At least not yet. Everything was too screwed up. She needed a place to heal, to hide and to plan her next move. And she had nowhere else to go. Finally she said, more as a defense than anything else, “Doug was wrong.” She turned away but Jennings grabbed her arm. De Roché and Theo saw the move and began making their way through the crowd toward them.
Soul Thief (Blue Light Series) Page 29