It began pulling the ropes up again, around her arms.
It says nothing to her, to Ruthie, but it knows that Ruthie is somewhere else in her mind. In Hell. Where all of them would be soon.
Once the Beast was out for good.
Then, it went over to tie up the intruder.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Trey opened his eyes.
Consciousness came back. He felt like he'd been tackled by an enormous linebacker. He was sore all over. Tasted blood in his mouth.
Saw a slightly overweight man in what looked like a green uniform. The man's back was to him. The jacket he wore had a logo of a lake and trees and read: Moon Lake Pure Spring Water.
Duane. Scoleri's brother in foster care. When they were kids. Here, playing in the mountains. Getting punished in this shelter.
Duane refastened the ropes around the pathetic form of his sister.
Trey felt pains in his back and sides, but managed to roll up to a sitting position.
He looked around for the gun, but he couldn't see it anywhere along the rock floor.
Have to use my body weight. He's a big guy. Maybe if I get him off-balance.
Duane turned, hearing the sound of his movement.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
It feels the Other One in the cage. It opens the cage to let the Other One out.
The Beast is coming.
It is coming inside his head.
It is burning through its brain to get out and use its flesh to tear the intruder.
It only feels the Beast inside it now.
Its hands seem like the claws of a lion.
Its feet seem to move in a blur of motion, as if it is flying to the intruder.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Trey stayed down as Duane came running at him. With the patients, you lean forward so they come for your face in front of you. When they're close enough, you pull back quickly. They're off-guard. The way Scoleri did in the car. The way he got you.
Duane did what Trey expected — went for the face. Having some delusionary idea that many of the patients at Darden State had — that all power was in the face, in the eyes, in the brain. When Duane did this — his hands outstretched to attack — Trey rocked back, maintaining his balance. Duane's eyes widened as he realized that he was going to tip over Trey instead of hitting him. Trey slid to the left. Duane tumbled to the ground. Trey swiftly moved on top of him, a knee to Duane's back.
From Duane's mouth, growling like a dog.
Using extreme force, Trey pressed Duane's face against the rock floor, focusing all his own weight into Duane's back, but staying clear of his legs. Duane would probably, in another moment, use his hands and a push from his knees to throw Trey off, but Trey reached and got his flashlight fast and slammed it down as hard as he could on Duane's head.
Duane was out.
For the moment.
Trey breathed too fast. He tried to calm himself from within, with a brief mantra that was little more than easy, easy. He dragged the unconscious Duane over toward Ruth. Then, he swiftly undid the ropes again around Ruth's arms. She had already begun screaming, and it echoed through the chamber like a high-pitched shriek.
Duane was just coming around. He looked up at Trey.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
It will kill him and drink his blood! It will sacrifice him like it did the little angels!
It summoned its Devil strength, and it pushed up, feeling nothing but a redness within its body, a fire-power that came from Hell, and it knew that its daddy was right, that it would be the end of the world, that it and Ruthie would one day be set out on their paths to destroying the world.
It swung its elbow into the intruder's ribs.
Chapter Seventy
1
The force of the blow knocked Trey back. The rope went flying.
Duane was up, and Trey had to dodge him quickly.
Jesus, he's strong.
Trey found quickly glanced around for the gun, hoping to see it in the twinkling white Christmas light glow.
He felt a swift kick to his groin. Trey doubled-over feeling nausea and pain.
Then a kick to his head.
Duane stood over him.
Something in his hand.
What? Trey could not quite make it out because Duane's hands were shaking so much. It looked as if Duane were about to explode if that were humanly possible, as if something were boiling in his blood.
Trey realized it, and then his first thought was: Lucas, I'm sorry.
"Cocksucker!" Duane shouted. "You don't mess with the Devil. I am going to send your soul to my homeland! You think you know what Hell is! You don't know what hell is! Fucking worm, you are going to burn for eternity! And when you feel the fires inside you and the worms in your eyes and the cold darkness around you, you will know that you are an it! You are an it and an it means shit and you live in shit and you will die in shit and you will burn in shit!"
His hands clutched a gun. Not the Sig Sauer. This looked like a Glock.
He doesn't know how to use it. He doesn't quite know.
Then, Duane began lowing like a cow, alternating with bellowing and a sound like a child crying from deep within his body. He became racked with coughs, but he kept the gun, unsteady as his hands were, on Trey.
Ruth made a noise, a keening sound. Trey looked over, and she rocked back and forth. Falling forward with a clattering sound.
Distracted for a moment, Duane glanced at her.
As he did so, a shot rang out.
To Trey, it seemed as if a second stretched into a perceptive minute in which he saw a brief flare from the gun that Duane held — Ruth crawling on her hands toward him, dragging her torso along as if it were dead weight — a hole blast into Duane's chest, his jacket spraying open with blood — and a strange steam coming from behind Trey's left ear.
2
Trey felt numb all over his body, but found that he could stand. He wasn't shot.
Duane had missed him.
From behind him, from the narrow corridor of stone, a woman in a police uniform emerged, a gun in her hand. She held it in front of her.
Elise Conroy's Sig Sauer.
Her left eye was bloodied and the eyelid swollen shut. Blood covered half her face. She was shivering nearly as much as Duane had been.
Then, she collapsed to the floor.
Trey heard sounds like mewling coming from Ruthie, who went to her brother, laying her body across his.
But Duane was not dead. Wounded. He was down.
But he might be able to get up again.
Before even checking on the collapsed police officer, he grabbed the ropes and crawled over to where Ruthie hugged her brother. As gently as he could, he drew Ruthie back. She fought against him, feebly, but moved away from Duane.
Not a lot of blood was coming out of Duane's wound, so he assumed that was good. Duane would be caught. He'd go to jail.
Probably end up in Darden State.
3
Michael Scoleri, already driving into the valley in Duane Cobble's crappy car, pulled over, feeling an intense headache.
Pounding at him.
He put the truck in park, and left the engine idling. He leaned against the wall of a liquor store at the edge of a strip mall.
Something in his head seemed to be triggering a massive headache.
He felt he heard Duane Cobble's voice in his head again.
Just a brief flicker of a voice.
Then it was out.
The words he heard in his mind:
Help me, Abraxas. Mikey. God.
Chapter Seventy-One
1
In the bomb shelter, with Duane safely tied up, and Ruthie lying near him, hardly a threat, Trey went to check on the policewoman.
2
"Thank god," she whispered, her voice raspy. "Thank god. I thought I'd die here." Although she seemed to have been beaten up, and he soon discovered that her eye had been pulled out, there was an unusual opt
imism in her voice.
"You're going to be fine."
"They're monsters. Those men. Monsters."
Trey couldn't respond. It was too soon.
He was afraid to ask about Lucas. He was afraid to hear from this woman that all of this had been a waste.
"The boy," she said. She pointed back to the narrow space between the walls.
"Alive?"
"Scared. Alive. Maybe drugged."
"It's all right. You don't have to talk anymore. It's all right."
"Go. Go. Tell him. Tell him it's all right. Go." She pushed him weakly. "Up. Up above. On the hillside, a house. Car. Phone. Police radio. We're beneath it. The house."
Just above. The Mad Place was between heaven and hell.
"Go. I'm fine. Fine," she repeated.
She was not fine, but because he wanted to make sure Lucas was okay, he leaned her against the wall.
Then, he retrieved his flashlight, and went into the narrow, dark stone corridor.
He had to press himself against the rock.
When he arrived on the other side, it was, again, dimly lit with the strung lights. This was more like a room, and even had a metal ladder at its center going up into what looked like a gap in rocks just a few feet above his head.
But the layout of the room made him gasp.
Stone statues, as if for either a chapel or a graveyard, were laid out in three of the roughly sliced corners of the room. The one that drew his eye immediately was of a stone angel; another of the Virgin Mother; and finally, one of Christ, his hands spread out in front of him.
Remembered Scoleri's words: a chapel of the damned, with an angel and a virgin and a statue of me, his God. But it's got bad stuff in it, too. It's the heart of the Mad Place.
They had been defaced with some dark substance. He could guess what it might be.
He hoped it wasn't blood.
The room's floor was rougher that the outer room, and covered with pebbles. At its center, a small bubbling pool of steamy water. A hot springs. There must be several in the caverns.
The waters come up from Hell, Scoleri had said.
And there, gone fetal in a corner, his knees tucked up against his face, his arms wrapped around his knees, Lucas Conroy.
"It's all right now," Trey said, softly but firmly. "Lucas. We're going to get help."
The boy stirred and looked over at him. His eyes, reddened, and surrounded with dark circles. His look, blank. He was in another world.
Been drugged. Trey wasn't sure what it might be, but he'd seen drugged people before. Darden State patients.
"Your mother sent me," Trey said, and went to lift Lucas up in his arms.
As Trey did so, he took in the scrawls on the walls of the chamber: devil faces and drawings of little children with angel's wings around their necks.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Feeling ragged, Trey cradled the boy in his arms as if he were his own son. He walked the hundred or so yards to the roadside. The crunch of fresh snow under his shoes felt good and pure.
He’d been feeling the filth of the life that the Red Angel had at his core. He intuited too much of the killer.
It made him feel dirty.
But the fresh cold air, the snow, the beautiful trees, and the dawn as it came on: it was like a new beginning.
It gave him a sense of the spiritual. There was more to life than just the here and now. He was meant to find Lucas. He was meant to do something to stop the man who had killed children.
His thoughts did not center on how he'd probably lose his job now for helping to break Scoleri out.
For setting Scoleri free.
He could not give a damn at the moment.
Elise Conroy was dead.
Children were dead.
But Lucas was safe.
It was all that mattered at the moment. Making sure that little boy got out of Hell.
Somewhere, over the chilly mountains, the sun was coming up from the desert.
The valley below, already warm, its lower elevations probably just reaching 70 degrees, while the mountains were in the high 20s.
From the cave behind him, steam from the hot springs.
Trey kissed Lucas on the forehead.
"It's okay," he said. "It’s okay."
He took the boy up in his arms.
He trudged through the snow, following the stone path and then saw the house in the near-distance.
He went into the house to call the police.
Chapter Seventy-Three
6 a.m.
1
After the ambulances, and the plow to help get the ambulances through; after darkness bled into the purple beginnings of dawn; after too much questioning, both in the small trailer in Moon Lake, and then, down the mountain at the San Pascal police department; a trip the emergency room to make sure he was okay; an officer drove Trey back to Redlands. The cop told him that Trey's wife had been up most of the night, once the County police were on the horn about Laymon and Fasteau going missing, as well as the disappearance of two staff members and a patient of Darden State.
Trey was numb, and had nothing more to say.
Nothing to feel.
All he thought about:
Home.
2
Trey walked into the dark house.
He flicked on the hall light.
Looked at the living room—the knickknacks in cubby holes, the Spanish-style fireplace jutted toward the center of the room, the old sofas, the grandfather clock Carly’s father had made. He looked out on the garden, the lights near the small reflecting pool hitting the shadows of bird-of-paradise and trumpet vine...He heard them.
Breathing.
His children.
He went into his son's room. Messy as it was. Stepping over a basketball left in the middle of the floor, around some plastic track he was building for his Hot Wheels. He sat down gently on the edge of Mark’s bed. Mark snored a lot for a kid. Trey put his hand at the back of Mark’s scalp and just held it there lightly.
Then, to his daughter's room, where he kissed her gently on the cheek. She turned slightly, her eyes still closed. In a dream.
After nearly an hour, he padded as quietly as he could down the hallway.
As he unbuttoned his shirt, Carly said, sleepily, “Thank god. I thought..." But she didn't finish. "You've been hurt. Trey?"
He went to her, and grabbed her, holding her as tightly as he could.
He kissed her, and then smelled the faint scent of baby powder, and felt a tremendous burden lift.
Home.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Completely. Go back to sleep.”
“They catch him?" she asked, but he could tell she was already back on the path of sleep.
“They did. I’ll tell you the rest when I get up,” he said. "Goodnight. I love you."
Even saying the words made him feel safe.
He slipped into bed beside her. They slept together, his arms around her. He felt her warmth, and didn't fall asleep for several minutes while he just listened to her gentle breathing.
It was the most beautiful sound on Earth.
Exhaustion finally took him into dreams.
3
Later that day — after he hugged his kids, after he checked the bandage on his scalp — he went to see two people in the hospital, getting treatment.
First, Lucas Conroy, whose father had spent the night with him in his hospital room.
Then, Trey went to see Jane Laymon.
4
That morning, earlier, when it was still dark out, Monica Scrubb got off her night shift at the Donut Queen and dropped by the doctor's office to pick up a prescription for the witch before she headed back up the mountain to the house on Moon Lake.
It took her longer than usual to get up there. When she pulled off the road to park the truck, she knew something was wrong because the local deputy, Hank Dollard, was out front with a few folks from town. Yellow police tape wound around the
house.
Instinctively, she touched her stomach. "You're gonna be all right, Matthew-or-Greta, don't worry. The witch probably died."
But she wasn't sure why there'd be the sheriff out there if old Mrs. Cobble had finally kicked off in her sleep. Which Monica had been hoping would happen, along with that damn old dog of Duane's.
5
At the Critical Care section of ICU at San Pascal Valley Hospital, Ruthie Cobble lay in a bed, a ventilator to keep her breathing, with monitors all around her bed.
She looked out the half-opened blinds at the clear morning as it came up.
It was the first dawn she had seen in nearly fourteen years.
Ruthie Cobble continued sleeping, waking up now and then and believing that the hospital room was a dream. Although no one predicted that a woman who had been kept for years in a bomb shelter would still be alive, she seemed to show every sign of getting a little better as each minute passed.
5
In a jail cell at the San Pascal County Sheriff's office, it looked up at the ceiling and began praying that God would release it from its torment. After all, God had put the Other One in Hell, and had made it live in the same body as it, the guy named Duane Cobble who was a sniveling little freak.
No match for the Devil.
Abraxas. Abraxas. I need you. I need you.
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 39