“Didn’t say nothin’, just…”
Cal’s words faded as a sudden pressure in Sean’s chest drew all of his attention. He squeezed his eyes tight, and the cement room in which he was held immediately fell away and a foreign scene flashed across his vision.
Two gunshots, a scream. A man with a ‘Y’ incision stumbling awkwardly, falling to the muddy ground.
A wide smile, Cheshire-like in proportions.
More shouts.
Sean’s eyes snapped open and focused on Robert. The man was also grimacing, and it was obvious that he had felt something as well.
There had been another ripple in the Marrow, something that wasn’t quite right. Only this one was more powerful than with the Harlops, or even at Seaforth.
Carson was alive; Sean was sure of it now. Only a Guardian could have caused such a stir.
“You feel that?” he gasped, knowing the answer before he even asked the question. Robert nodded, and the man cleared his throat, trying to play off the pain.
This surprised Sean; most of the other Guardians he had known over the years felt these ripples in the Marrow as a twinge, a palpitation, or just a feeling that something wasn’t right. But Robert was different; like Sean, Robert felt it in his very core.
“He can’t stay here,” Sean said at last, clearly meaning Aiden. “Carson has done something, is doing something, and we don’t have much time. The longer—”
“He stays, at least until you tell us what you want, until you tell us where Carson is.”
Sean closed his eyes again and shook his head. Despite the revelation, he couldn’t give Robert the information he so desperately sought. At least, not until speaking to the Cloak.
The Cloak would know what to do.
Sean resigned himself to lowering his head. It was clear that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with these men, at least not with his current approach.
“Robert, the Cloak is a Guardian, just like you and me. Been around for even longer than me, if you can imagine. And I need to go speak to him.”
Robert crossed his arms over his chest, but despite the gesture, Sean knew that he had captured the man’s interest.
But Cal was the one who spoke up first.
“And why, pray tell, do you so desperately need to see this mysterious caped crusader all of a sudden?”
Sean didn’t take his eyes of Robert when he answered.
“Because…because it’s not Amy that Leland needs, but Shelly’s baby.”
Robert stopped pacing and he turned to face Sean.
“What are you talking about? He already has Amy, my daughter.”
Sean sighed.
“Robert, you don’t understand…the prophecy, the prophecy doesn’t say a child of a guardian will hold the rift open, but a child of Guardians. Guardians, plural.”
Robert stopped his forward advance.
“What are you saying, Sean?”
“What I’m saying is that Shelly is a Guardian, Robert. And Leland doesn’t need Amy, but he needs the unborn baby in Shelly’s belly.”
Chapter 25
The detective’s gun landed in the mud with an audible splat.
“What the fuck is going on?” Hugh stammered. He tried to backpedal away from the truck, but his heel snagged and he fell on his ass. Then he froze and stared as the seven corpses flowed out of the back of the truck. Some landed awkwardly on their feet, while others simply fell face first, not even bothering to brace themselves for impact. Although they all took a unique, uncoordinated route from the truck bed to the ground, they had more in common than their horribly pale flesh, wounds, and smeared makeup from the funeral viewings: no matter how clumsily they fell, they eventually pulled themselves to their feet.
Even to Carson, these dead were a ghastly sight. There were five males and one female, and two whose gender was hard to make out based on the level of decomposition.
Jesus, did Vinny dig these ones up himself?
Detective Hugh had put a bullet in the chest of the only woman, but it hadn’t even fazed her.
“Run, Hugh! Run!” the older cop shouted, but it was too late for little Hugh.
Michael slipped an arm around his waist and hoisted him to his feet. The detective didn’t struggle, didn’t even object to being manhandled. Carson caught a glimpse of both detectives’ faces, both restrained, and marveled at how pale they had become.
“Well, this is not how you saw this going down, I reckon,” Carson said with a laugh.
“Should we let them at ‘em?” Bella asked, indicating the dead that had since risen to their feet.
It was a sight that Carson doubted he would ever become comfortable with, no matter how many times he witnessed it: the dead bodies standing there, their heads low, their hands dangling limply at their sides, occasionally twitching like someone with advanced Tourette’s.
Waiting for instructions. For his instructions.
“No, don’t think so, Bella. I think we should keep these guys alive for a little while longer. Might come in handy.”
Michael’s expression soured, and Carson remembered his promise to the man.
“I said you could have Vinny, not these men. Where is he?”
Michael shook his head, the frown a permanent fixture on his face now.
“Don’t know. Bastard set us up and then left. I think he went inside, but can’t be sure. You didn’t see him?”
Carson shook his head. He and Bella had been downstairs, and there are plenty of places for even Ratman to hide on the ground level. He stepped forward and addressed the detectives—Vinny could wait.
“Tell me, gentlemen, are you here on your own, or are you expecting friends?”
Hugh looked pale on the verge of translucency, and had resorted to staring at the mud in front of him. The second detective, Ed, looked embarrassed at being overtaken by Bella.
Don’t worry, fella, you aren’t the first and won’t be the last.
When there was no immediate answer, Carson walked over to the man in the hideous sportscoat that could now list mud speckles to its list of endearing attributes. As he approached, Bella’s grip on his hair tightened and the blade tickled his Adam’s apple. Carson squatted on his haunches so that he was at eye level. When he reached out, the man recoiled as best he could given Bella’s grip.
Carson gently brushed some salt-and-pepper hair from the man’s temple.
“You better answer me, detective. And you better tell the truth, because, trust me, I won’t have to tell sweet Bella here twice to cut out your windpipe. So, what do you say? Have someone on the way? More cops, maybe? FBI?”
At the mention of the FBI, the man’s eyes dropped from Carson’s, which in his book was as good as a nod.
“Ah, okay. FBI. How many, then? One, two? Ten?”
The man didn’t answer and Carson shook his head.
“This isn’t charades, Detective. You best answer me, or I’ll have Bella—wait, you know what?” He turned to Michael, who had Hugh in some sort of modified rear-naked choke. “Michael? I don’t think our detective friends believe we are serious. Why don’t you show them? Just a little taste?”
Michael didn’t hesitate. He leaned forward and clamped his incisors down on Hugh’s ear. The man howled and finally started to struggle, but Michael’s grip held him firm. As he screamed, the dead started to twitch more frantically, but Carson kept them at bay with his thoughts.
Michael lifted his chin and Carson saw Hugh’s ear start to stretch unnaturally. The man’s screams intensified as his entire scalp started to lift, and out of the corner of his eye, Carson noticed that the other detective, immobilized by Bella’s knife, lowered his head.
With one final tug, and one last howl from Hugh, the top third of the man’s ear tore away. There was far less blood than Carson would have expected, but there was enough of it to turn his sideburns and temples red.
Carson had to give the man credit; to his surprise, he refrained from anything more than a whimper after th
e chunk was removed. When Michael started to chew loudly, his mouth partway open, Carson turned his attention back to Ed, and indicated for Bella to raise his head.
She obliged, a smile on her pretty face. When she was smiling, he could almost overlook the missing chunk of hair.
“Now do you believe that we’re serious? Hmm? I bet you do. So tell me, fine sir, how many FBI officers should we be expecting?”
When the man replied, his voice was low, bordering on a whisper.
“Just one,” he admitted. “Just one.”
“Good. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Chapter 26
Shelly knew even before the steam cleared from the shower that Robert was gone. She felt it in her gut. Unlike when the quiddity were near, this wasn’t a tightness, per se, but more of a release, a strange calming sensation that overcame her.
And, ironically, it was unnerving.
The thin veneer of calm didn’t last long.
“Goddammit!” she shouted, tossing her hairbrush at the mirror. It shattered, but the fragments remained glued in place. The loud noise gave her pause, and she took a moment to stare at her reflection, knowing that her reaction was, at least in part, driven by her hormonal changes.
Her breasts, full to begin with, had grown thicker, more full, and her nipples were dark and swollen. Her belly was not as large as she might have expected at nearly five months along, but she chalked this up to being full-figured to begin with.
With a heavy sigh, she regained control of herself. A part of her knew that Robert was right, that she shouldn’t be out chasing ghosts in her present state.
It was just too risky.
But another part of her couldn’t stand being alone, of not being part of the team anymore.
So what if I’m pregnant? I’m still important. I’m still a valuable member of the team. I still have a fucking brain, don’t I?
Somewhere outside, she heard the gate at the bottom of the drive squeak open. With a deep breath, Shelly resisted the urge to run down there, shake a broomstick in the doorway like some crazed witch, and beg Robert and Cal and Aiden, who she knew had all gone with him like a fucking Boy Scout troop, to take her with them.
She knew Robert well enough.
He would simply drive off without her, leaving her embarrassed, ashamed, and alone, instead of just the latter.
Instead, she performed her post-shower routine, trying to regain some semblance of normalcy. She dried her body with the coarse towels that felt like they had been made of porcupine quills, then brushed her short blonde hair straight.
Getting dressed proved to be an adventure, as she had yet to shop for new clothes. She told herself that she hadn’t had time, which given their activities of the last little while wasn’t untrue, but deep down she knew a large part of it was because she was in denial.
After all, Shelly had never had any designs of becoming a mother. No, she was quite content in living her life as a free spirit, a transplanted hippie, if you will.
Of spending her hours banishing quiddity to the other side.
Her tumultuous relationship with her biological mother prior to the adoption process had soured the notion of motherhood long ago. And besides, who wanted to be beholden to an infant? A suckling babe that, if left alone for a day, maybe even less, would perish? A fucking amoeba, one that if you poked, it reacted, but otherwise it just shat itself and cried when it was hungry? Who could be expected to love that?
Being a mother was the most anti-feminist thing on Earth.
Yet her feelings for the child, for children in general, now that one had been implanted in her, had warmed slightly, and her rhetoric was used as more of a defense mechanism rather than a credo to live by. It wasn’t love, not quite—love was something that was to be worked for, like a plant, groomed, blossomed, given space and time to grow—but it was something.
Something new, something strange, something oddly good, in a world shrouded in bad.
Shelly squeezed into her leather pants, threw a loose blouse on top, and was about to leave the room when she saw something on the bedside table, her bedside table, that hadn’t been there before.
It was an old photograph, and the image, although black and white, had yellowed slightly around the edges.
As Shelly made her way toward it, she realized that her hands were starting to shake, even though she couldn’t make out the details yet.
There was just something about the way it was propped up against the alarm clock, the way it had been folded and was now creased…
When Shelly picked it up, she started to cry.
It was her, of course, and everything suddenly made sense: the pressure she felt when the quiddity were around, the way she had intrinsically known how to banish the quiddity from the Harlop Estate even before she had been shown how.
The gap in her childhood was so very much like Robert’s that it was incredible that she hadn’t noticed the similarities before.
Or maybe she had noticed them, but had blocked these painful memories deep down inside.
Shelly thought back to when they were in the helicopter, when she had been mostly asleep and had hollered after Robert when he ran toward Seaforth Prison.
“I know.”
Why did I say that? Why?
Tears spilled down her cheeks and dripped onto the photograph. They distorted the much younger version of herself sitting on the church floor, which was only fitting, given how she felt right now. It was as if her life had been ripped out from beneath her.
A series of images flooded her mind then, materializing slowly at first but quickly picking up steam. She saw her foster parents, their kind, loving faces, their laughs. Then she was transported backwards in time, and now she was the girl in the photo, sitting on the floor of the church, waiting for Father Callahan to come collect her. Next, she was at the massive wooden church doors, a man holding her hand, offering her to the priest. The flashes of her past started to speed up, moving backward, culminating in the image of a drab classroom, of plain desks. Of dust motes circling in stale air.
She was a Guardian, she knew that with as much conviction as she knew she was pregnant. She had been there, in the orphanage, when it had all begun. Before…
Shelly closed her eyes tightly, trying to remember, while at the same time hoping that she couldn’t. Something horrible had happened at that orphanage, something that had left many of them dead. But try as she might, she couldn’t recall any of the details. The crappy desks, the drab classroom, candles flickering across scared faces; she remembered all of these things. She remembered the teachings, bits and pieces of someone instructing her—them—and it dawned on her that this was likely why she had been so adamant about denying the existence of the book, Inter vivos et mortuos.
Because the mental block that had been erected in her mind had convinced her that it didn’t exist—that that time didn’t exist. It couldn’t exist, as nothing that bad, that horrible, could happen to children.
That life was not her.
Shelly suddenly felt pity for Robert, for what he must have gone through when he’d had the rug had been pulled out from beneath him.
For what he must have felt upon realizing that everything he’d thought about where he had come from, who he was, had been just a lie, perpetrated by Father Callahan and Sean Sommers.
And Robert wasn’t the only one.
The orphanage, I need to get to the orphanage. There are answers there.
Shelly wiped the tears from her cheeks and put the photograph in her pocket. She felt movement in her belly, and she put her hand there, expecting to feel the baby kick.
But it was too early for that.
It was probably only indigestion.
And then she did the very thing she had promised herself she would never do. Shelly ran down the stairs, threw the massive door open, and shouted into the night.
“Robert! Robert, get the fuck back here! I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”
But t
he only answer was the wind and the chirping of a blackbird embedded in the dark sky.
Sobbing now, overcome by emotion and hormonal changes, Shelly went back inside the Estate where she grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper and began writing.
Chapter 27
“Well? What are we going to do now? Just sit and wait for the FBI to arrive?” Bella demanded.
Carson looked at Michael, who was staring out of the crematorium door at the eight dead bodies that stood awaiting further instruction. There was a drop of blood in the corner of his mouth, and his lower lip was circumscribed by a dark red line.
“One; one FBI agent. What did the older detective say the man’s name was?”
“Agent Brett Cherry,” Michael responded, not taking his eyes away from the dead. Carson didn’t blame him.
“Yeah, that’s right. Agent Cherry.”
“We can’t just keep the two detectives in the back of the truck forever, you know,” Bella piped in.
“I know.”
“Do you know where they parked their car?” Michael asked.
“I thought you said they came in the truck?”
“They did. But if they just grabbed Vinny close to here and hopped in, that means their car is nearby. Every one of those damn police cars has GPS—if the two detectives don’t check in after a certain period of time, they’re going to trace them here. And then we are going to have a much bigger problem to deal with than one FBI agent.”
Carson scratched his chin.
“Where is that cocksucker Vinny, anyway? You said he went inside?”
“I said I think he went inside. Detectives ambushed me and I didn’t see where he went.”
Carson turned to Bella.
“Take a peek around, see if you can find him.”
Bella glared at him; she wasn’t the type of woman that took kindly to being told what to do. Not by Carson, not by anyone.
“What about him?” she asked, gesturing to Michael, who didn’t notice as his eyes were still staring at the twitching dead.
“What about him?”
Sacred Heart Orphanage (The Haunted Book 5) Page 11