by Heath, Jack
He opened his eyes wide, and instead of resenting the invasion of the spirits, instead of feeling compromised and overwhelmed, he invited them into him, he asked for their light and for it to combine with his own. His body was so starved of oxygen it wanted to shut down, and he felt the darkness so hard and impenetrable now he could barely see the light in the room beyond its boundary. The light was only a foot or two away in any direction, but he was trapped in a bubble of darkness. With the last vestiges of consciousness he focused his mind on the outer light. While he knew his own life force was vastly insufficient to reach it, he felt it amplified and bolstered now by that small light that each of the millions spirits offered up to him.
His own quickly dimming light, reinforced and reflected and supercharged by the millions upon millions of tiny lights offered up by the millions upon millions of souls, became like a fist of light that forced back the darkness, that punched through and for a moment made a hole in the shell of death and entrapment.
John felt air rush through the hole, and along with it the light of the room poured in like a blinding sunrise. In that same instant he heard the voices of the Coven grow louder, their chanting increasing in urgency, the words coming faster, full of desperate emotion. For several seconds the darkness seemed to deepen and gown even harder, and the hole seemed to grow smaller.
But the oxygen had come in, and it went straight to John's brain, and he felt his own internal light intensify. As it did, the light he drew from all the other spirits seemed to grow as well, and John felt his rage build inside like something wild and uncontrollable waking from a deep slumber.
The voices might have been louder, the chanting faster, but John was now able to pull the light from deep inside. How much was his own and how much came from all the other spirits and how much was the result of that light being reflected and reinforced by the joining and yearning of all the spirits now bound together inside of him John could not have said.
He only knew that at some point there seemed to be an explosion. He heard no sound, but saw the blinding flash of light that shattered the darkness like a firebomb going off in the deepest night, and when his eyes readjusted he saw the aftermath of the explosion, the litter of bodies thrown from the table to the corners of the room, their positions so unnatural that he knew without checking for pulses that they were all dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
AT FIRST HIS HEART WENT INTO HIS MOUTH because he thought Sarah had been caught by the blast, but then he saw her, sitting in her chair, looking unruffled with not even a hair out of place, looking as if not even a light breeze had disturbed anything near her. She sat just as she had before, not seeming to have seen or heard anything and apparently not noticing the bodies that had been thrown from their chairs and against the walls when the explosion occurred. Even now her expression remained as placid as that of a store mannequin.
Only one other person sat at the table—Jessica Lodge. She was still in her chair, not having been uprooted by the blast, but she looked different. Her previously elegant hair had been blown askew, and her face had a deep cut along the left cheek where a flap of skin now hung down but no blood flowed. John could see several of her molars through the hole.
Her hands were still stretched out to either side, just as they had been when she'd been holding hands with her fellow Coven members a few seconds earlier. Her right hand held the fingers and partial hand of the person who had been sitting to her right, and her left hand was empty but looked as if the flesh of her fingers had been fused together in the fiery blast.
As John watched her, Jessica Lodge blinked at him several times, and as she did the color of her eyes seemed to shift, deepening from blue to black, as the pupils elongated and became something saurian and inhuman. John squinted and the image of Jessica Lodge seemed to flicker, as if he was seeing two distinct figures both occupying the same space. One figure was Jessica, but a more cadaverous version, with her bloodless cut cheek, her molars showing through, her flesh seeming to shrink tighter and tighter to her bones even as he watched; and the other figure taller and more massive yet still gauntly skeletal, a figure of darkness that peered out at him through its slit pupils, that sat hunched as if it had been sleeping in a confined space for a long, long time and was only now beginning to try and stretch its body to its true height, but a figure with hatred and evil radiating off its charred-looking flesh like heat coming off a red-hot stove burner.
John's heart quickened. He felt fear of this creature and terrible revulsion coiling in his guts. Inside himself he heard the moan as the millions upon millions of spirits reacted to this creature that was and was not Jessica Lodge. John's brain kicked into high gear, his thoughts racing as if Rebecca Nurse was whispering to him, her words coming out almost faster than the ear could hear or the brain could process. What he realized in that moment was that something unspeakably evil was trying to birth its way into the world, something that lived inside of Jessica Lodge or something that looked out through Jessica Lodge from a vastly darker and more terrible place—whatever the exact truth was, it was now trying to enter the world of humans.
Knowing instinctively what he needed to do, John closed his eyes and opened himself, dropped every shred of ego and identity, every aspect of uniqueness that made him John Andrews, and like a man throwing his arms wide to welcome the world, he called out to the spirits inside him. He found them waiting. Whatever light they possessed, whatever glimmer of energy, whatever spirit life they had was focused on him, given to him to use as he would.
Feeling the energy begin to fill him, he felt something else that almost eluded description but which he knew was the supercharging effect of fear, of hatred of evil, of a desire for vengeance over the powers of evil.
He brought up his hands, realizing the ropes that held him had burned away. Aiming his palms at Jessica Lodge and at the creature that was trying to take her place, the creature that had almost succeeded, whose blackness seemed to intensify, whose size seemed to grow as it unfolded, whose radiating evil nearly made it impossible for John to focus his energy, he managed to fix his mind and hone the energy of all the millions of converging spirits into a momentary nova aimed at the birthing creature.
He heard a cry of rage and pain and superhuman anger, but in that same instant he was thrown backward out of his seat and felt his head slam against something hard. Then there was nothing but blackness. And in that moment, as darkness seemed to take over everything, he realized he had lost.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
"DAD?"
The voice came from faraway like a hand reaching down through impenetrable darkness to offer a way back to the light.
"Dad?"
John's exhaustion called out to him, told him to lie still, that he had done his job and done it well, that he could allow his heart to stop beating now, let his lungs cease their effort of pulling new air. It was telling him to ignore the voice, that he deserved the rest, that he could let other people carry the burdens from now on.
"Dad? Please . . ."
Some small ember sparked, and as if Sarah's voice was a gentle breeze, it began to glow hotter and add its heat to other embers that had nearly gone out. He felt his lungs inflate as cool air rushed in, and he felt his heart contract, at first slowly, but then faster and with more assurance. After several seconds he managed to open his eyes and saw Sarah looking down at him.
"Thank God," she said, as if to herself, her eyes brimming with tears that ran down her cheeks. "I thought you were dead. You weren't breathing. You hit your head on something and you're bleeding like hell. Is anything broken? Do you have a concussion?"
John opened his mouth, tested his jaw to make sure it worked. He could feel the now cooling blood on his collar and his shoulders and realized Sarah had wrapped his head in a piece of cloth she must have torn from one of the dead men's shirts.
"How long was I out?" he managed.
Sarah shrugged. "Maybe five minutes."
"What about Jessica
?"
"She's dead. They're all dead." She blinked and used her wrist to wipe away her tears. "How did you survive? How did I survive? What happened here?" She looked around at the undisturbed table and the horribly mangled bodies that had been thrown back against the walls. "What could have caused this? It's so horrible! Was it a bomb? It had to be some kind of explosion, but it doesn't make any sense. We have to call the police. My God!"
Sarah seemed to be getting more panicked by the second as she tried unsuccessfully to wrap her mind around the unexplainable.
"Sarah," he said, his voice sharp. He waited until she got enough control to look at him, and he saw the fear in her eyes. "Help me stand up."
"No, you shouldn't move."
"Help me up," he said again, and then he started to roll over, showing her that he was going to get up regardless of what she wanted.
She made a face but took his arm and helped him to stand, and he gritted his teeth against the pain that seemed to shoot through every fiber of his body. When he finally got to his feet the room seemed to spin, and he leaned against the wall and waited for the dizziness to subside.
The act of standing seemed to have started his head bleeding anew, and Sarah reached up and tightened the makeshift bandage that John realized was a white shirtsleeve. He only knew that because he looked at the floor a few feet away and saw the severed arm lying there. It looked like it had been torn off at the shoulder in the first explosion.
Using Sarah and the wall as crutches, John made his way slowly around the room, stepping over and around the bodies of the other Coven members, seeing with satisfaction that they were all dead, until he got to where Jessica Lodge lay and he heard Sarah's choked intake of breath.
"Oh my God," she whispered.
There was no question that Jessica was dead. A massive hole gaped in her chest as if she had been run through by something about the radius of an artillery shell. However when John looked at her more closely, there was a question as to whether it could really be Jessica Lodge because her body appeared far more damaged than any of the others, her skin shrunken onto her bones giving her an emaciated look of someone who had just been released from a concentration camp. Also, her eyes were still open, and John could see that even though they were already clouding over, the pupils were still absolutely black and vertically elongated like those of a lizard.
Unlike the other dead Coven members, Jessica's hands and arms had not been blown off or mangled beyond recognition, and that was the thing that John found most disturbing. Her hands did not seem to be something that could have been part of a small woman's body. They were black and elongated, the fingernails inhumanly long, ending in coarse, savage points that could only be claws.
As John stared down at her he shuddered, realizing that something far beyond his ability to understand had been about to take place and had been only narrowly averted. Jessica Lodge, whether she had been fully human or something else, had been in the process of transforming into some kind of demon. He had no idea what the thing was that she had been about to become, but he had a sense that no matter how much power he'd been able to harness from the spirits that had entered him, it would not have been sufficient to kill the thing with the slit pupils and the claws of a beast.
He sagged back against the table, and then he remembered. "Amy?" he asked Sarah. "Where is she? Is she . . ." he let his voice trail off, unable to say the word yet knowing that the fate of anyone captured by the Coven was almost certainly a horrible and painful death.
Sarah was still holding his arm to keep him from falling. She shook her head. "I don't know."
"Did you see her? Try to remember."
Sarah closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair. "I don't remember anything from the night somebody grabbed me when I parked my car on Pickering Wharf when I was coming to your house for dinner. Everything after that is like a dream or being on an extended drug trip. I don't remember seeing Amy. I don't really remember anything. How long have I been gone?"
John nodded and tried to think back to how many days it had been since Sarah's abduction, realizing it had only been six or seven days, even though it seemed like months. "You weren't here that long," he said. "A little more than a week." He said it absently, his thoughts focused on Amy. He had barely spoken to her in the past thirty-six hours, feeling angry and offended and hurt when he learned how much she had misled him. Now he just wanted to find her alive and in one piece, and he wanted to start the process of erasing the gulf that had grown between them.
"I feel like I've been in a time warp," Sarah said. "I can't remember anything specific, but I have these visions of walking with Jessica and having pleasant talks." She threw her gaze around the room, looking at the dead bodies again, and John felt the shudder that passed through her body. "Jesus H. Christ," she exclaimed, her voice becoming tinged with hysteria. "What are we going to do?" she demanded as a sob escaped her throat.
"We have to try and find Amy," he said again, struggling to keep his thoughts focused but once again feeling the cold dread rise up in his stomach. "Then we have to get out of here."
"But don't we have to call the police?"
"This doesn't need the police. The Coven will clean it up or change it before the police could ever get here."
"The Coven? What's the Coven? Who are you talking about?"
"I'll explain later. First help me find Amy."
"You can barely even walk. I need to call an ambulance."
"No ambulance. No phone calls. I have to walk. I have no choice."
With Sarah holding one arm and John leaning on the wall for support, they walked out of the dining room and started to make their way down a long hallway that had a number of doors leading to other rooms. There were no windows, but John felt no surprise at that. He knew they had to be underground, just as they had been in the Coven's lair in Salem.
As they reached the first doorway, John came to a stop. "Open the door," he said, steeling himself against what he might find.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
SARAH LOOKED AT HIM, AND HE COULD SEE THE fear in her eyes. "Can't we just go?"
"Open it," he insisted.
She let go of his arm, took a deep breath as if she feared that something terrible might come flying out at her, turned the handle, and pushed the door inward. Then, when nothing came hurtling out the door at her, she reached inside, felt around for a light, and turned it on. The room was empty, just consisting of shelving on two walls and a sink on the third wall. Several buckets stood in a line on two of the shelves, but rather than giving him a sense of normalcy, John recalled the buckets in the prison rooms in the Coven's catacombs beneath Salem and felt a fresh chill.
The door to the next room was different than the previous door. Strong bolt locks on the top and bottom of the thick door panel told him exactly what the room had been used for. If he'd had any question about it, he had none when he spotted the small hatch at the bottom of the door that would allow one of the buckets from the storage room next door to be shoved inside to a prisoner.
"Open it," John said when they came even with the door.
Sarah threw the bolts back and with the same obvious reluctance, shoved open the heavy door. There seemed to be no light switches inside, but the light that leaked into the room from the hallway lights illuminated the cell well enough for John and Sarah to see that the room was empty, but also the filthy blanket in one corner and the overturned bucket beside the door.
Sarah let out a gasp as she made mental connections. "Are these . . ."
"Yes," John said. "They're cells for keeping prisoners."
Sarah looked down the hallway at two more identical doors that followed the one they were looking into. "Did you know these would be here?" she asked.
John nodded. "They never put you in one?"
"No, I'm sure I would have remembered, but . . . oh my God. Who would they have kept here?"
"The people they sacrificed."
"What?"
"I'll explain later. Just keep going."
They continued down the hall, pushing open both of the other cell doors, but finding them as empty as the first, each one holding only an identical filthy blanket and bucket.
Up ahead of them was the last door that opened off to the side and then a final door at the end of the hallway that John guessed had to lead to a staircase that would take them up to the first floor. When he stopped outside that door, Sarah looked at him, but when she saw the determination in his eyes, she turned the knob and pushed it open.
The first thing John saw was the white tile on the floor, and it made his heart freeze. "Turn on a light," he said in a choked voice as he looked through the dimness at what looked like a dark shape against one wall.
Sarah felt around the inside wall near the door and John heard a click. Then he saw what he had been dreading, and when Sarah saw it, she screamed and backed out of the room in horror.
It was Amy, naked, her body chained to the wall and savagely tortured. Blood pooled at her feet. John felt dizzy, and he gripped the wall to try and stay upright as he felt his knees turn to water. It was only when he heard Amy let out a groan that he found the strength to stay on his feet and even take a few steps toward her.
"Amy," he whispered. "Oh, God, what have they done to you?"
Hearing his voice, Amy managed to raise her head. "John," she said, her voice so ephemeral it was barely audible. "I'm . . . so sorry."
"For what?" he said, his voice breaking as he took in the nearly unimaginable damage, the cuts up and down her legs, on her abdomen, her viscera peeking out in several places. He forced himself to swallow and tried to shove down the anguish he felt. "Don't talk," he said, looking around for a key to the shackles that held her. "We're going to get you out of here."