by Ninie Hammon
“Do you know where that was located?” Jack heard himself ask, detached, a good investigator.
“It didn’t say, but there was an arch in the logo that was either the Saint Louis Arch or McDonalds.”
Jack saw that Daniel’s face had gone pale. He started to say something to Jack, but didn’t. Jack heard his own detached, official voice as if someone else were speaking. “I’d bet my last Tootsie Roll I can guess the name of the little girl Willingham was asking for in St. Louis.”
Jack and Daniel spoke in the perfect unison of a Greek chorus: “Becca.”
Theresa looked from one of the men to the other.
“What are you two talking about?” Jack could hear the apprehension in her voice.
“I told you about the two wannabe mass murderers. One tried to blow up a crowded theater—that theater in Savannah.”
Theresa gasped and her hands flew to her mouth.
“And the other—”
“They was after Becca!” she whispered.
Daniel finally found his voice. “Now, let me get this straight,” he said carefully, articulating every word individually. “You’re saying that somebody broke in here and—”
“Wouldn’t nobody have to break in. Most nights we didn’t even lock the back door. Wouldn’t have to do no snoopin’ around, neither. Them pictures with her name on them was right there on the fridge beside the door.”
“Somebody got their hands on those pictures.” Daniel plowed doggedly ahead. “And then used them to go looking for—”
“Close, but no Kewpie doll,” Jack said. He felt that familiar icy calm steady him, the kind that only settled over him when everything in his world was about to hit the fan. When he spoke, it was to Daniel, but he was looking at Theresa.
“It’s not somebody who’s trying to find Becca. It’s something. All three of our former teammates went psycho because they were possessed,” he said. And held his breath.
Theresa nodded but didn’t speak.
“So the demon at the school was also in—?”
“Not exactly,” Theresa interrupted. “Sorry, Jack, you ain’t gone get no doll, neither.”
Jack knew then. Maybe it’d been dancing around the outside edges of his consciousness for awhile, but now it kicked open the front door and stood hot and stinking right there in front of him.
“What exactly does not exactly—?” Daniel began.
“It means she’s not saying that the bug-creature Andi saw at the school possessed all three men.” Jack turned to face her. “You’re saying there were three different demons.”
* * * * * * *
Michael Rutherford lay back on the starched white pillowcase, gasping, then looked at the pretty little nurse with what passed for a gleam in eyes made rheumy with illness and medication.
“Got so depressed about all this”—he gestured at his room in Bradford’s Ridge Regional Hospital, the IV poles, monitors, the plastic tube of oxygen that fit like a horse’s bit in his nose—“I called the Suicide Hotline…and the automated attendant said to press one for English.”
She patted his hand.
“You shouldn’t try to talk, Mr. Rutherford,” she said.
“…and when I did, they connected me to a call center in Pakistan.” He had to pause to gulp in a gasp of air but he’d have paused there anyway, for effect. In comedy, timing was everything. “When I told the dude at the call center I wanted to kill myself, he asked if I could drive a truck.”
The little nurse couldn’t help a smile. Michael chuckled air-lessly.
“Tell me something,” he whispered. “If four out of five people suffer from diarrhea, does that mean one of them enjoyed it?”
She giggled then and he struggled to stifle his own laughter and the resultant fit of coughing. But he didn’t have the strength. She snatched a handful of tissue from the box on the bedside table and gave it to him as he hacked, then took the blood spattered tissues and deposited them in the trash when he fell back on the pillow, wheezing.
“Like I said, Mr. Rutherford, you need to stop talking and rest.”
He wanted to tell her that Michael Rutherford never stopped talking, that he was a Talk-A-Holic, the original Talk-a-tron, Talk-errific Talk-A-Lator, that even when he was a kid, his machine-gun fire speech had awed his friends. Well, maybe not awed…
“Mikey, will you shut up, zip it, put a sock in it,” Jack Carpenter says, then snaps a pitch into the center of Daniel Burke’s glove as effortlessly as swatting a fly. “Don’t you ever stop talking?”
Mikey isn’t offended; he’s pleased. He has carved out his place as the “fourth musketeer” with the inseparable threesome of Jack, Daniel Burke, and Becca Hawkins by being a clown, making them laugh. That’s what fat kids did, right? They made other people laugh.
Mikey fires another line as pointedly and effortlessly as Jack had fired the pitch. “Ever wonder who was the first person to see a cow and think, ‘I believe I’ll squeeze those dangly things and drink whatever comes out?’”
Mikey always laughs at his own humor, a braying donkey laugh that is itself funny, and the sound of it finally brings a smile to the taciturn Jack. Daniel smiles, too, and Becca, who is standing beside Mikey, watching the other two play catch, actually giggles. Her giggles sound like the ringing of tiny bells and Mikey is afraid his throat will swell completely shut from the joy of hearing it.
“If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn?” he asks, in an effort to keep those bells ringing.
Michael coughed again, but weak this time, not in a chain of irresistible barking that made black spots appear on the edges of his vision and ground like broken glass in his chest. The agony of it brought tears to his eyes. Even with the huge doses of whatever painkiller they were giving him, it hurt so bad he wanted to sob. But you had to have breath to cry and he didn’t have any left. You had to have breath to laugh, too, and he couldn’t do that anymore, either.
His thoughts went again to Jack, Daniel and Becca. Funny how the past seemed more real than the present sometimes. Maybe it was that way for everybody at the end. Is that what folks meant when they said they saw their lives pass before their eyes?
But in the past week, it had been more than memories that had made Michael’s life pass before his eyes. He knew he ought to tell somebody about it, though he didn’t know who. Or what he should say.
All that bad stuff that happened before—well, it’s happening again—that’s what he should say. But to whom? Who would understand? Who would care?
He was surprised by how badly it still scared him to think about those days, that one summer, even today, more than a quarter of a century later. And he’d been on the sidelines, purposefully, intentionally on the sidelines, not right in the middle of it all like Becca, Jack and Daniel.
For years, he’d told himself he’d imagined most of it, that it couldn’t have happened the way he recalled. But dying had a way of stripping away pretense. He knew now that it was real, it had all been real twenty-six years ago. And it was real today, too.
He shivered, a stab of that old terror running down his spine like ice water dripping down his collar. Even now, he still felt that out-of-proportion fear he’d felt then, that terror that didn’t match the circumstances. What had happened was…impossible, the things he’d seen couldn’t have happened, only they did.
But even the impossibility of what he saw couldn’t account for the level of horror and terror he felt watching it. There was something more, something worse than his eyes could see, something darker and uglier than his mind could even imagine, some evil intent that turned his thoughts to images of mouldering corpses and his senses to the reek of decay.
He’d never been able to reconcile that fear, had merely run mindlessly away, blind flight that had left him panting and sweating, heedless of the spreading warm wetness that stained his pants.
Then it was gone. Over. As quickly and strangely as it had begun, the cloud of terror that hung over him, over the who
le community, or so he’d imagined, was gone.
Now, it was back.
He glanced out the window at what he could see of the sky through the trees and imagined he saw a dark pall blotting the light.
Well, Michael McKinley Rutherford wasn’t going to have to live through those days again. He cocked his head and gave an imaginary salute to the Big C, the cancer that would spare him another summer like the one he’d lived through in 1985. Actually, it wouldn’t be the out-of control cells chewing up his lungs that would spare him, though. This time at least, he would be the master of his own fate.
He fingered the big syringe with the needle that must have been three inches long—the one the cute little nurse with the turned-up nose had called a “garden hose needle.” Bless her heart, she’d looked high and low for that thing after he’d snatched it off the metal tray when she wasn’t looking. Now, he kept it hidden under his pillow, waiting. Screwing himself up to it, gathering his nerve.
It wouldn’t be long now. The way his pain level was outrunning the meds they gave him to relieve it, before long it would take more courage to keep on breathing than to put the needle in the juncture of his IV and shove air into it. He’d read that it might take a lot of air—maybe the length of a whole IV line, to do any damage. Michael didn’t care. He’d just keep pumping in air like he was blowing up a bicycle tire. Something would pop eventually.
But not yet. He had awhile yet. Another sunrise or two, maybe. He wanted to pet his dog again—they’d be bringing Charger day after tomorrow. He could hold out that long, wait long enough for the feel of the golden retriever’s soft fur. He wanted to listen to the sound of the “Rolling Stones Greatest Hits” on his iPod again, too. And stay on the earth long enough for one more peek down the front of the uniform of the nurse whose top button was always undone.
He wrapped his fingers protectively around the syringe and slept.
When he awoke, it was dark. And he wasn’t alone.
* * * * * * *
“Three of them?”
Daniel spoke with such wonder and horror and revulsion that his words hung out in the air between them like a curtain, separating each from the other, momentarily isolating them all.
“Why couldn’t it have been only one—?” he asked.
“’Cause demons is wherever they is, just like people—can’t be in two places at one time. When Jack shot that crazy fool who killed my Bishop, he sent that bug creature screaming back to hell where it belongs,” Theresa said. “The demons that possessed them others—they’s sent back to hell, too, when them men died.”
“So now we’re not trying to figure out what we did to piss off a single demon, we’re trying to figure out what we did to piss off three of them.” Daniel groaned.
“If it’s all wrapped up in that missing summer, then the playing field’s a little different, but the rules of engagement haven’t changed,” Jack said, trying desperately to sound reasonable and rational when he didn’t feel either one. “We still have to find Becca—whether it’s one demon that’s willing to commit mass murder to find her— or a whole herd of them. She’s the only one who knows why. And until we know—”
“No, not the only one.” Daniel turned and looked at Theresa. “You were there that summer. You knew us and the other guys on the team. “You must have seen something going on. What was it?”
“They was lots of things going on that year, starting on…Valentine’s Day,” she said. “But I can’t tell you much about nothin’. I might have been smack up there in the middle of it all…but for a year, maybe two after that Valentine’s Day, I wasn’t worth shooting.”
“What happened on Valentine’s Day?” Daniel asked, and as he did, his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, saw it was the hotline volunteer, and sent the call to voicemail.
CHAPTER 22
The big streetlight at the corner of the building usually filled Michael Rutherford’s hospital room with so much light the nurses had to pull the shades so he could sleep. But tonight the light was inexplicably out. The room was dark except for light from the hallway that fell in a golden arrow through the slit of his partially open door, and the glow of monitors that painted the area around his bed a bilious green. He could hear sounds from out there in the hallway, the muffled whush, whush of nurses’ shoes on the tile floor, the clatter of metal water pitchers and bedpans, the murmur of voices.
What he could hear in the room was breathing. Heavy breathing. Not labored breathing like his own, though—sick and clotted. Heavy like someone had been running. Or was excited.
“Who is it?” Michael asked the darkness. “Who’s there?”
“Hello, Mi-key.” The voice didn’t sound familiar. But the childhood name, pronounced in two syllables, and the tone of contempt that colored the words planted a niggling itch in his memory. Where had he heard—?
“Got any jokes to tell, Fatty Cakes?”
Michael couldn’t even gasp. Takes air to gasp. But he was afraid—oh, my, yes!—he was so stricken with mind-numbing terror his bladder let go and wet warmth flooded the bed.
The only person in his life who’d ever called him Fatty Cakes was Ronnie Martin. And he hadn’t seen Ronald Martin since that long-ago summer when dark horror stalked every corner of his world.
Denial tried to leap to his defense. They were grownups now, after all. He should laugh and tell Ronnie to turn on the light, let Michael get a look at him, see how the years had treated him, maybe joke about a growing paunch or receding hairline.
He didn’t laugh or joke, though, because he didn’t have enough air, wouldn’t have had enough air even if cancer hadn’t chewed a hole through both his lungs. He wouldn’t have been able to say a thing if he’d had the lungs of a young boy, a twelve-year-old boy, who couldn’t speak then either.
“You were with them, Mikey,” the darkness said. “Too fat and stupid to be one of the group, just the tail they wagged behind them. But you helped the three and the light. Now you’re gonna help me.”
The inky blackness formed words in a pitted throat full of rocks and pieces of broken glass. “Where’s Becca?”
Becca Hawkins?
Michael hadn’t seen Becca Hawkins since high school! She’d become invisible after that summer. Michael had tried to talk to her, engage her, make her laugh those little bells again. But it was almost like she didn’t know who he was. Becca had melted into the background of the school and life until after graduation and then she vanished for real and no one ever heard from her again.
When Michael didn’t answer the question—because he didn’t know the answer and because he had no breath at all for speech—the thing that had spoken moved closer.
What Michael Rutherford experienced then could have been a trick of his failing eyesight, or an illusion occasioned by the massive doses of narcotics in his bloodstream. It was neither. Michael had a foot in both worlds. Teetering on the brink of living and dying, dangling between ultimate light and absolute darkness, had granted Michael a gift. Or a curse. Michael Rutherford knew.
A form appeared in the glow of light around his bed. It didn’t step from the darkness, it was made of darkness—not only in this room, but all darkness everywhere, all bottomless pits, all deep holes filled with black water where horrible things had drowned and left behind their formless, mouldering corpses. Its shape was of some great winged creature with the hideous face of a deformed ape. One eye was lower than the other, both were red and looked out from under a brow ridge with no forehead above it. The top of the creature’s head was lumpy, with horns protruding at odd angles, and incisors the size of daggers stuck up past pendulous black lips below a pig-snout nose—only half of it was missing.
Cold flowed out from it in a wave. It frosted the tiny stream of Michael’s breath that leaked out his nose past the oxygen tube, then hung in a shiny white trail of lace in front of his upper lip.
Though the form had wings like a bat, it had the hairy legs of a spider wrapped tight around Ronnie
Martin. The left side of Ronnie’s face drooped, his left arm hung useless, but he held in his right hand a screwdriver that glowed in the green monitor light.
“We used one of these on Jack,” Ronnie said and his breath glowed white in the frigid air. “Drilled it into his bones.”
Michael knew what they’d done to Jack with the Phillips head. He’d watched them.
“I’m going to use this on you like we did on Jack unless you tell me what I want to know.”
Michael looked pleadingly into eyes the gray of frozen ashes. He was unable to beg for mercy because he had no air for speech.
And for a moment, an instant, Michael saw a spark of humanity in Ronnie’s eyes, so sunken they looked like twin holes in his face. For a heartbeat, those eyes locked with Michael’s and he saw there a terror and desperation he had never seen in another human being.
Then the look vanished and one of such feral savagery took its place that Michael would have gasped if he could have.
Ronnie leaned over the bed, his face inches from Michael’s. The creature on his back spoke, its voice as empty and cold as an Arctic wind blowing across a thousand miles of barren ice. “I want Becca!”
From Ronnie’s throat came a sound unlike any Michael had ever heard. It was a human growl, the snarl of a mad dog.
Michael’s panic exploded. He shrieked soundlessly with his poisoned, rotted lungs and struck out in a reflex to push him, to push it away. Ronnie let out a high-pitched squeal and a drip of warm liquid splashed on Michael’s cheek. Then Ronnie grabbed Michael—or seemed to—but didn’t hold on. The weight on Michael’s chest slid instantly away and he felt a stinging pain as the IV needle in his arm yanked free. On the heels of the pain was a clattering sound and a thump. He sucked in air and began to cough and suddenly light flooded the room.