A flash of light in his periphery drew his gaze, and he lowered the shotgun while turning to face the monitor.
There, on screen, were four people he had never seen before standing in the entrance of Seaforth Prison.
And one of them was holding an automatic assault rifle.
The cavalry had arrived.
You’re going to pay for this, Carson. You’re going to fucking pay.
Chapter 30
The lights came back on, but they were muted now, pervading the hallway in a dull gray glow. This didn’t bother Father Callahan; after all, his eyes barely worked these days.
The aching priest shuffled along, noting the eerie silence of the prison. If he needed further affirmation, something in addition to the dreams and visions, seeing Ben’s quiddity roaming the halls, and the fact that it had been Carson Ford of all people that had killed him, then this was it: no prison should be this quiet, and definitely not one full of such hardened criminals as Seaforth.
In prisons, silence only happened in death and before a storm.
Father closed his eyes for a moment, and pushed away thoughts of his previous life that threatened to fill the silent void—thoughts about failed exorcisms, about time lost, about young boys that he couldn’t protect. This was about the now, and now he needed to concentrate.
Eyes still closed, Callahan used his hands brushing against the walls as his guide. And he continued to keep his mind empty, blank, waiting for the power of the Marrow to envelop him. His breathing regulated, his eyelids, still closed, began to flutter, and the concrete wall against his calloused fingertips became a generalized sensation.
He’s here—Carson’s here, and…and there’s someone else.
Father Callahan opened his eyes and was shocked to see a man standing before him. He was wearing a guard’s uniform, the same navy blue that Ben Tristen had been sporting.
For once, the priest was grateful for his poor vision; the man’s face was covered in bloody streaks, and there was something wrong with his eyes, but he couldn’t make out the details.
“Are you…are you here to guide me?” Callahan asked uncertainly. It was ironic, of course, the blind leading the blind.
The man seemed confused by this, his face contorting.
“I think—” He cleared his throat. “I think I need to take you somewhere.”
Father Callahan nodded and took a step forward, his old heart pumping harder now in his chest. Even as the keeper of the book, even knowing what he knew, Callahan still had to concentrate to see the quiddity; most of the time he knew they were there, but to actually see them required significant effort.
Most of the time he was content in just letting them pass by him without incident.
But not this time.
The dead guard slowly turned on his heels and began walking, his gait hitched, lacking the fluidity of normal movement. It was as if he were some sort of marionette.
And Father Callahan knew exactly who the puppeteer was in this puppet show of gore and pain.
The priest’s hand slipped under his robe and he gripped the handle of the blade tucked beneath for comfort.
And to reassure himself that it was still there.
“Come,” the guard said over his shoulder to the priest. “Please, come with me. They’re waiting for you. They’ve been waiting a long, long time for you.”
Father Callahan swallowed hard and took an uneasy step forward.
Without his guide, Father Callahan knew it unlikely that he would have been able to find his way to Cell Block E even if his mind had been clear. Although not a particularly large prison—what did Ben say? It holds twenty-two prisoners?—it was built in such a way that made the course to Cell Block E unintuitive, which was clearly intentional.
When they turned the final corner, Father Callahan felt a pressure build inside his chest, and he knew that they were close.
Sweat beaded on his forehead.
He was nervous. So nervous, and not for the first time he began to question his motivations.
What if the book is wrong? What if all of this is wrong?
Callahan wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. It was natural, he knew, during times of stress to question one’s faith. He wasn’t the first to feel this way.
In fact, it wasn’t even the first time for him.
A man of the cloth, the events that transpired all those years had changed him. And when he had been given the book…that had changed everything.
Back then, his challenge had been physical as well as mental. Which was why he had put Robert up for adoption; he wasn’t fit to raise the boy, wasn’t fit to even look after himself.
Especially not after what happened to Christine.
Images of the botched exorcism, of the poor junkie gagging, spewing water, flooded his mind, and it was all he could do to lift his leg and keep moving forward.
The guard suddenly stopped in front of him, and Callahan snapped out of his head.
“Open the door,” the man instructed.
Callahan squinted hard, unsure of who the man was speaking to.
“M—” me? he meant to ask, but then, after blinking rapidly several times, he realized that he wasn’t the intended target.
The scene before him suddenly came into focus. The guard wasn’t speaking to one person, but dozens.
There were so many men, all dressed in identical white t-shirts and gray pants, that they seemed to almost make a wall.
A silent, unmoving wall of inmates.
Callahan shuddered with the realization.
This is why the prison is so quiet. All of the inmates are here, guarding Carson.
In the back of the priest’s mind, he hoped that Ben was hiding somewhere, that he was okay.
Or that he’d managed to get out before all of this.
But despite the warnings he had issued the warden, he doubted it. Ben was as stubborn as he was devoted, and Callahan knew that he wouldn’t leave this place. He was like a captain of his own personal ship—and whatever happened, he was destined to go down with it.
The men, heads still hung low, parted, allowing him passage to the door, which someone had opened. None of the men even acknowledged the priest.
A sudden calm came over Father Callahan, vanquishing any fear that he might have—should have—felt in their presence.
These men wouldn’t hurt him, he knew; they wouldn’t dare.
The inmates’ faces were downcast, and they all looked the same to him. Sure, they were of different ethnicities, and they had different hairstyles, tattoos, scars, but in a way, they were all the same.
They were dangerous men, but they weren’t the most dangerous in Seaforth.
Carson was—he ran the show here.
And for reasons that he couldn’t fathom, Carson was allowing him passage.
Father Callahan’s grip tightened on the handle of the hidden blade as he took a step forward.
The guard held the door open for him as Father passed through, and the priest waited for him to follow. But the man shook his head.
“No, I need to stay here,” he said. “He has another job for me.”
Father Callahan glanced down the long hallway before him, and nodded. There were maybe four or five wooden doors on the left-hand side, but despite never having been here, he was certain he knew which one that Carson was housed in.
He could just feel it; he could feel it like a tug on his old bones, gentle teasing of the thin hair sitting atop his wrinkled scalp.
A pull on his quiddity deep inside him.
His oneness.
The priest turned back to face the blinded guard one final time just before the door closed.
Father Callahan swallowed hard, and then shuffled forward.
He didn’t need his guide anymore. He was alone.
Alone to do one more job.
One more job to do. One. More. Job.
Chapter 31
“You know where to go, Aiden—lead t
he way.”
The man waved the light on the gun back and forth, working his way slowly down the narrow hallway, Sean following closely behind him. Robert hung back, shielding Shelly, who took up the rear.
Robert could hear as well as feel her breath on his neck, and it offered him strange comfort in the deathly quiet prison.
There was plenty that was not right at Seaforth—he didn’t need any special dreams or powers of perception to tell him that.
Still, as he moved deeper into the silent prison, he did feel something…something in his chest, a tightness that at first he mistook for fatigue. But as they continued at a snail’s pace led by Aiden and his assault rifle, the sensation grew stronger, and somewhere deep in his subconscious, he knew that it was the tug of the Marrow. The rift, or whatever Carson was doing, was messing with the air, rendering it thicker, making time move more slowly. He had felt this several times before, Robert realized—in the basement of the Harlop Estate with James, and in the cabin in the woods with George—but back then he had passed it off as…well, as something he didn’t quite understand. But now, imbued with new knowledge that Sean had shared with him, he knew what it was.
Every spirit that stayed in this world brought a little bit of the Marrow with them.
And here, in this place, there were a lot of spirits.
And this wasn’t a good thing.
Shelly’s breathing suddenly became more rapid, and he chanced a look over his shoulder at her. Her pretty red lips were pressed together tightly and her eyes had a strange vacant look to them.
“You feel that, too?” he whispered.
Her eyes cleared.
“No,” she answered quickly, and Robert instantly knew that she was lying. The question was: why? Why would she lie about it? But before he could challenge her, Aiden’s voice drew him back.
“Hold,” he instructed, holding up a closed fist. They were at a bifurcation in the hallway, the left leading to what looked like an exterior door, the yard, perhaps, while the right had a sign above reading Mess Hall. It dawned on Robert that here, in this place, they weren’t only going to have to be on watch for quiddity, but for mass murderers as well. He hoped that the latter were tucked away in their cells, sleeping for the night, but from what he had seen in movies, prisons were never this quiet.
One could hope, but one could just as easily deceive themselves. In Robert’s experience, they were one and the same, and both were recipes for disaster.
“What is it?” he whispered, but Sean hushed him.
Aiden kept his gun light trained on the door to the mess hall. For nearly a full minute, the four of them just stood in the hallway and waited. And then, just as Robert’s nerve was about to fray, the door slowly opened.
Robert felt his blood run cold.
A man, his face buried in his hands, his posture stooped, walked through the door as if on a Sunday afternoon stroll.
As if all was right in the world.
“What the—?”
But Sean hushed him again. The man in the uniform didn’t seem to notice them as he continued toward them.
Robert’s heart was racing now, and he waited with clenched teeth, trying to guess what was going to happen next. If he should act, do something.
Is this a prisoner who stole guard’s clothing? Is Aiden going to open fire?
He could feel Shelly press up against him from behind, and together their heartbeats set their bodies rocking.
This is so fucked, this is so fucked, this is so fucked…why isn’t he doing anything?
And then the man started to laugh, and Robert nearly lost it. It was a horrible, monotone sound that grated on his very soul.
“Stop,” Aiden instructed, waving his gun back and forth.
The emergency lights suddenly clicked and the man turned his face skyward. It was only then that Robert noticed the man’s hands were covered in blood. And when he pulled his hands away from his face, he realized that this was no inmate, but the guard that had been murdered.
A gasp escaped him.
The man’s eye sockets were hollow, empty. Shelly’s arms clenched his waist so tightly that he had a hard time taking a deep breath.
“Stop!” Aiden instructed again. Unlike Robert and Shelly, he seemed unfazed by the man’s horrific appearance.
Just as the man seemed unfazed by Aiden and his gun; he kept walking toward them.
A sound to their right, a heavy exhalation, suddenly drew Robert’s gaze.
“Sean!” he shouted, but his warning was too late.
Inset on the hard, concrete wall was a small door that they had passed only seconds ago, which, at the time, had been firmly closed. Now, however, it was flung and a man lunged from the interior, his body like a spear aimed directly at Sean’s side.
Sean swiveled, as did Aiden, but both men were too slow. The man, who had a shaved head covered in blue tattoos, struck Sean in the side, sending him flying across the hallway. He grunted when his back smashed the wall, and the pistol fell from his hand and clattered to the ground. Robert shoved Shelly backward and together they spun away from the crazed inmate.
“Sean!” someone shouted.
Sean somehow managed to extricate himself from the man’s grip, and then, breathing heavily and with his right arm hanging uselessly at his side, he tried to circle away.
But the man with the tattoos was like a caged animal, his eyes glinting even in the terrible lighting, a snarl etched on his hard face. He leapt at Sean once more, and despite receiving a solid uppercut to the jaw, the blond man was once again driven to the ground.
“Aiden!” Sean yelled. But Aiden was already on them, moving Robert and Shelly even further away from the brawl.
Aiden didn’t hesitate. He drove the toe of his boot into the man’s ribs, sending an audible crack up and down the hallway. The man rocked to one side, which offered just enough separation between the two men for Aiden to safely fire.
The hallway erupted in a thunderstorm. The sound of the gunfire—a resonating trrtt-trrtt-trrtt—rattled Robert’s molars, while the bright flash from the muzzle sent fireflies scattering across his vision.
The man’s bald head was no longer blue with tattoos. In fact, Robert couldn’t see his head at all; it had exploded into a spray of red and white and gray, soaking Sean, who was still partially beneath him.
“Oh god,” Shelly moaned.
Robert felt like he was going to be sick, and turned away from the inmate’s corpse.
Despite the ringing in his ears, he slowly began to pick up another sound.
The sound of laughter.
The guard!
Robert whipped around just in time to see the eyeless guard reaching out for Shelly, his fingers mere inches from her shoulder. Unlike Robert, she was transfixed on the dead man on the ground, watching in horror as blood continued to pump and spurt from his ragged stump of a neck.
They had forgotten all about the man with no eyes.
“No!” Robert screamed as he tried to pull Shelly away. But the guard continued to reach for her.
Robert felt the tightness in his chest grow to a level that was nearly unbearable, as if the blow that Sean had delivered to the inmate’s jaw had connected with his solar plexus.
“Stop!” he shouted as loudly as he could, holding up one hand.
And then something strange happened.
The laughter stopped, the man’s blood-streaked face went slack, and he instantly became still.
Chapter 32
“Get up,” Ben ordered. “Get the fuck up.”
Peter spat a mixture of teeth and blood onto the floor.
Most of it ended up on the front of his guard uniform.
“Up. Now.”
To emphasize his point, he delivered a soft kick to the man’s leg. This spurred him to action, and Peter got to his feet, which was awkward given that Ben had bound his hands behind his back with some zip ties he had found in the desk.
“You don’t know what you’re doing
,” Peter said, his words slurred from his smashed mouth. “This is bigger than you.”
Ben shoved him forward, then stepped behind him.
“Shut the fuck up,” he ordered. For good measure, he pushed the end of the shotgun into the man’s spine. Then he adjusted the other shotgun across his chest and made sure that the Taser and pistol were still on his hip. “Now move.”
Peter took two steps forward, then slid to his right to avoid Smitts’s burnt body. Ben himself averted his eyes, trying desperately to remain focused and avoid feeling more of the nagging guilt.
Before binding Peter, he had forced the man to switch the images on the monitors. Eventually they’d found Father Callahan.
The priest was at the door to Cell Block E, and Ben watched in awe as first the inmates parted, then the door seemed to open on its own before stepping through.
And that was where Ben was headed now.
He had to save his friend.
Switching the monitors again, Peter had located the other men—including the one that was clearly military, followed by what looked like admin and two civilians—as they made their way into the main hallway, but then he had lost them.
“Move, Peter. You’re leading the way.”
Seaforth’s head of IT took several more steps forward, but then he stopped abruptly.
“They’ll kill me, you know. They’ll kill you, too. They don’t care—”
Somewhere far below them, a sound erupted, a deep, resonating buzzing. Only it wasn’t a buzz-saw.
Ben knew that sound, and he knew it well.
It was the man in black’s automatic rifle.
The warden’s expression suddenly hardened.
“Move, Peter. Move now!”
Chapter 33
Robert wasn’t sure what had happened. One minute he was certain that the quiddity was going to grab Shelly and take her to the Marrow, and the next he seemed locked in place, unable to move.
“Robert?” Shelly asked quietly. She sidled up beside him, slowly, carefully, weary that any sudden movement might break whatever spell had fallen over the dead guard. “What’s going on? What did you do to him?”
Seaforth Prison (The Haunted Book 3) Page 12