Darkest Hour

by Meg Cabot

  “Jack,” I said. “Run over there to that gold box beneath the crucifix—see it?—and pull out the decanter of wine you’ll find there.”

  Jack hurried to do as I had asked. I put my face close to Father Dominic’s and whispered, “You’ll be okay. Hang on, Father D. Keep it together.”

  A very loud, splintering crash distracted me, and I glanced around the rest of the church with a sudden sinking feeling. Diego. He was here somewhere. I’d forgotten all about him—

  But Jesse hadn’t.

  I don’t know why, but I had simply assumed that Jesse had stayed up there in that creepy shadowland. He hadn’t. He had slipped back into this world—the real world—without, apparently, much thought as to what he might be giving up in doing so.

  On the other hand, down here he was getting to beat the crap out of the guy who killed him, so maybe he wasn’t giving up all that much. In fact, he looked pretty intent on returning the favor—you know, killing the guy who’d killed him—except, of course, that he couldn’t, since Diego was already dead.

  Still, I had never seen anybody go after someone with such single-minded purpose. Jesse, I was convinced, wasn’t going to be satisfied merely with breaking Felix Diego’s neck. No, I think he wanted to rip out the guy’s spine.

  And he was doing a pretty good job of it, too. Diego was bigger than Jesse, but he was also older, and not as quick on his feet. Plus, I think Jesse just plain wanted it more. To see his opponent decapitated, I mean. At least, if the energy with which he was swinging a jagged-edged piece of pew at Felix Diego’s head was any indication.

  “Here,” Jack said breathlessly as he brought the wine, in its crystal decanter, to me.

  “Good,” I said. It wasn’t whiskey—isn’t that what you’re supposed to give unconscious people to rouse them?—but it had alcohol in it. “FatherD.,” I said, raising his head and putting the unstoppered decanter to his lips. “Drink some of this.”

  Only it didn’t work. Wine just dribbled down his chin and dripped onto his chest.

  Meanwhile, Maria had begun to moan. Her broken neck was snapping back into place already. That’s the thing about ghosts. They bounce back, and way too fast.

  Jack glared at her as she tried to raise herself to her knees.

  “Too bad we can’t exorcise her,” he said darkly.

  I looked at him. “Why can’t we?” I asked.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know. We don’t have the chicken blood anymore.”

  “We don’t need the chicken blood,” I said. “We have that.” I nodded toward the circle of candles. Miraculously, in spite of all the fighting going on, they had remained standing.

  “But we don’t have a picture of her,” Jack said. “Don’t we need a picture of her?”

  “Not,” I said, gently putting Father D.s head back on the floor, “if we don’t have to summon her. And we don’t. She’s right here. Come on and help me move her.”

  Jack took her feet. I took her torso. She moaned and fought us the whole way, but when we laid her on the choir robes, she must have felt as I did—that it was pretty darn comfortable—since she stopped struggling and just lay there. Above her head, the circle Father Dom had opened remained open, smoke—or fog, as I knew it was now—curling down from its outer edges in misty tendrils.

  “How do we make it suck her in?” Jack wanted to know.

  “I don’t know.” I glanced at Jesse and Diego. They were still engaged in what appeared to be mortal combat. If I had thought Jesse had lost the upper hand, I’d have gone over and helped, but it appeared he was doing fine.

  Besides, the guy had killed him. I figured it was payback time, and for that, Jesse did not need my help.

  “The book!” I said, brightening. “Father Dom read from a book. Look around. Do you see it?”

  Jack found the small, black, leather-bound volume beneath the first pew. When he flipped through the pages, however, his face fell.

  “Suze,” he said. “It’s not even in English.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and I took it from him and turned to the page Father Dominic had marked. “Here it is.”

  And I began to read.

  I’m not going to pretend I know Latin. I don’t. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was saying.

  But I guess pronunciation doesn’t count when you are summoning the forces of darkness, since, as I spoke, those misty tendrils began to grow longer and longer, until finally they spilled out onto the floor and began to curl around Maria’s limbs.

  She didn’t even seem to mind, either. It was like she was enjoying the way they felt around her wrists and ankles.

  Well, the chick was kind of dominatrixy, if you asked me.

  She didn’t even struggle when, as I read further, the slack on the smoky tendrils tightened, and slowly, the fog began elevating her off the floor.

  “Hey,” Jack said in an indignant voice. “How come it didn’t do that for you? How come you had to climb into the hole?”

  I was afraid to reply, however. Who knew what would happen if I stopped reading?

  So I kept on. And Maria soared higher and higher, until…

  With a strangled cry, Diego broke away from Jesse and came racing toward us.

  “You bitch!” he bellowed at me as he stared in horror at his wife’s body, dangling in the air above us. “Bring her down!”

  Jesse, panting, his shirt torn down the middle and a thin ribbon of blood running down the side of his face from a cut in his forehead, came up behind Diego and said, “You want your wife so badly, then why don’t you go to her?”

  And he shoved Felix Diego into the center of the ring of candles.

  A second later, tendrils of smoke shot down to curl around him, too.

  Diego didn’t take his exorcism as quietly as his wife. He did not appear to be enjoying himself one bit. He kicked and screamed and said quite a lot of stuff in Spanish that I didn’t understand, but which Jesse surely did.

  Still, Jesse’s expression did not change, not even once. Every so often I looked up from what I was reading and checked. He watched the two lovers—the one who had killed him and the one who had ordered his death—disappear into the same hole we’d just climbed down from.

  Until finally, after I’d uttered a last “Amen,” they disappeared.

  When the last echo of Diego’s vengeful cries died away, silence filled the church. It was so pervasive a silence, it was actually a little overwhelming. I myself was reluctant to break it. But I felt like I had to.

  “Jesse,” I said softly.

  But not softly enough. My whisper, in the stillness of the church, after all that violence, sounded like a scream.

  Jesse tore his gaze from the hole through which Maria and Diego had disappeared and looked at me questioningly.

  I nodded toward the hole. “If you want to go back,” I said, though each word tasted, I was sure, like those beetles Dopey had accidentally poured into his mouth, “now is the time, before it closes up again.”

  Jesse looked up at the hole, and then at me, and then back at the hole.

  And then back at me.

  “No, thank you, querida,” he said casually. “I think I want to stay and see how it all ends.”

  chapter

  seventeen

  How it all ended that day was with Jack and Jesse and me helping Father Dominic, when he finally came around, to a phone, so that he could call the police and report that he’d stumbled across a pair of thieves looting the place.

  A lie, yes. But how else was he going to explain all the damage Maria and Diego had done? Not to mention the bump on his noggin.

  Then, once we were sure the police and an ambulance were on their way, Jesse and I left Father Dominic and waited with Jack for the cab we’d called, carefully not talking about the one thing I’m pretty sure we were all thinking: Paul.

  Not that I didn’t try to get Jack to tell me what was up with his brother and all. Basically, the conversation went like this:r />
  Me: “So, Jack. What is up with your brother?”

  Jack: (scowling) “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Me: “I can fully appreciate that. However, he appears to be able to move freely between the realms of the living and the dead, and I find this alarming. Do you think it is possible that he is the son of Satan?”

  Jesse: “Susannah.”

  Me: “I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

  Jack: “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Me: “Which is perfectly understandable. But did you know before now that Paul is a mediator, too? Or were you as surprised as we were? Because you didn’t seem very surprised when you ran into him, you know, up there.”

  Jack: “I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  Jesse: “He doesn’t want to talk about it, Susannah. Leave the boy alone.”

  Which was easy for Jesse to say. Jesse didn’t know what I did. Which was that Paul and Maria and Diego…they had all been in cahoots. It had taken me a while to realize it, but now that I had, I could have kicked myself for not seeing it before: Paul’s keeping me occupied at Friday’s while Maria had Jack perform the exorcism on Jesse. Paul’s remark—“It’s easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar.” Hadn’t Maria said the exact same thing to me, not a few hours later?

  The three of them—Paul, Maria, and Diego—had formed an unholy trinity, bound, apparently by a common hatred of one person: Jesse.

  But what possible reason could Paul, who’d never even met Jesse until that moment in purgatory, have to hate him? Now, of course, his dislike was understandable: Jesse had done him a very great bodily injury, something for which Paul had sworn to repay him next time he saw him. I’m sure Jesse wasn’t taking it too seriously, but I was worried. I mean, I’d just gone to a lot of trouble to get Jesse out of one sticky situation. I wasn’t too enthused about seeing him plunge straight into another one.

  But it was no good. Jack wouldn’t talk. The kid was traumatized. Well, sort of. He actually seemed like he’d had a pretty good time. He just didn’t want to talk about his brother.

  Which bummed me out. Because I had a lot of questions. For instance, if Paul was a mediator—and he had to be; how else could he have been walking around up there?—why hadn’t he helped his little brother out with the whole I-see-dead-people thing, said a few words of encouragement, assured the poor kid he wasn’t crazy?

  But if I’d hoped to get any answers out of Jack on that account, I was sadly disappointed.

  I guess if I’d had a brother like Paul, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it either.

  Once Jack had been safely dropped off at the hotel, Jesse and I began the long walk home (I didn’t have enough money on me for a ride from the hotel back to my house).

  You might wonder what we talked about during that two-mile trek. A lot, surely, might have been discussed.

  And yet, to tell you the truth, I can’t remember. I don’t think we really talked about anything important. What was there to say, really?

  I snuck in as successfully as I’d snuck out. No one woke up, except the dog, and once he saw it was me, he went right back to sleep. No one had noticed that I’d been gone.

  No one ever does.

  Spike was the only one besides me who’d noticed Jesse was gone, and his joy at seeing him again was an embarrassment to felines everywhere. I could hear the stupid cat purring all the way across the room….

  Although I didn’t listen for long. That’s because what happened was, I walked in, pulled down the bedclothes, slipped off my slides, and climbed into bed. I didn’t even wash my face. I climbed into bed, looked one last time at Jesse as if to reassure myself he was really back, and then I went to sleep.

  And I stayed asleep until Sunday.

  My mother became convinced I was coming down with mono. At least until she saw the bruise on my forehead. Then she decided I was suffering from an aneurysm. Much as I tried to convince her that neither of these things was true—that I was just really, really tired—she didn’t believe me, and would, I’m convinced, have dragged me to the hospital Sunday morning for an MRI—hey, I had been asleep for almost two days—except that she and Andy had to drive up to Doc’s camp to bring him home.

  The thing is, I guess dying—even for just half an hour—can be very exhausting.

  I woke ravenous with hunger. After my mom and Andy left—having extracted from me a promise that I would not leave the house all day, but would instead wait meekly for them to return, so that they could reassess my state of health at that time—I downed two bagels and a bowl of Special K before Sleepy and Dopey even showed up at the table, looking all tousle-headed and unkempt. I, on the other hand, had already showered and dressed, and was ready to face the day…or at least unemployment, since I wasn’t certain the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort was going to extend my contract with them, due to my having missed two days of work in a row.

  Sleepy, however, reassured me on that account.

  “Naw, it’s cool,” he said as he shoveled Cheerios into his mouth. “I talked to Caitlin. I told her you were going through, you know, a thing. On account of the dead dude in the backyard. She was okay with it.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t actually listening to Sleepy. Instead, I was watching Dopey eat, always an awe-inspiring sight. He stuffed one entire half of a bagel into his mouth and seemed to swallow it whole. I wished I had a camera so I could record the event for posterity. Or at least prove to the next girl who declared my stepbrother a babe how wrong she was. I watched as, without lifting his gaze from the newspaper spread out before him, Dopey stuffed the other half of the bagel into his mouth and, again without chewing, ingested it, the way snakes devour rats.

  It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen. Well, apart from the beetles in the orange juice container.

  “Oh.” Sleepy leaned back in his chair and plucked something from the counter behind him. “And Caitlin said to give this to you. It’s from the Slaters. They checked out yesterday.”

  I caught the envelope he tossed. It was lumpy. There was something hard in it. SUSAN, it said, on the outside.

  “They weren’t supposed to check out until today,” I said, ripping the envelope apart.

  “Well.” Sleepy shrugged. “They left early. What can I tell you?”

  I read the first letter enclosed in the envelope. It was from Mrs. Slater. It said,

  Dear Susan,

  What can I say? You did such wonders for our Jack. He is like a different boy. Things have always been much harder for Jack than for Paul. Jack just isn’t as bright as Paul, I suppose. In any case, we were very sorry not to be able to say good-bye, but we did have to leave earlier than expected. Please accept this small token of our appreciation, and know that Rick and I are eternally in your debt.

  Nancy Slater

  Folded into this note was a check for two hundred dollars.

  I’m not kidding. That wasn’t my pay for the week, either. That was my tip.

  I laid the check and the letter down beside my cereal bowl and took the next note out of the envelope. It was from Jack.

  Dear Suze,

  You saved my life. I know you don’t believe it, but you did. If you hadn’t done what you did for me, I would still be afraid. I don’t think I will ever be afraid again. Thank you, and I hope your head feels better. Write to me if you ever get a chance.

  Love, Jack

  P.S. Please don’t ask me any more about Paul. I’m sorry about what he did. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He is not so bad. J

  Oh, right, I thought cynically. Not so bad? The guy was a creep! He could walk freely within the land of the dead, and yet when his own brother was being terrified out of his wits by the fact that he could see dead people, the guy didn’t lift a finger to explain. Not so bad. The guy was very bad. I sincerely hoped I never saw him again.

  There was a second postscript to Jack’s letter.

  P.P.S. I t
hought you might want to have this. I don’t know what else to do with it. J

  I tilted the envelope, and to my great surprise, out popped the miniature of Jesse I’d seen on Clive Clemmings’s desk, back at the historical society. I looked down at it, stunned.

  I would have to give it back. That was my first thought. I had to give it back. I mean, wouldn’t I? You can’t just keep things like that. That would be like stealing.

  Except that somehow, I didn’t think Clive would mind. Especially after Dopey looked up from the paper and went, “Yo, we’re in here.”

  Sleepy glanced up from the automobile section he’d been scanning, as usual, for a ’67 black Camaro with less than 50,000 miles.

  “Get out,” he said in a bored voice.

  “No, seriously,” Dopey said. “Look.”

  He turned the paper around, and there was a picture of our house. Alongside it was a photo of Clive Clemmings and a reproduction of Maria’s portrait.

  I snatched the paper away from Dopey.

  “Hey,” he yelled. “I was reading that!”

  “Let somebody who can pronounce all the big words have a try,” I said.

  And then I read CeeCee’s article out loud for both of them.

  She’d written, basically, the same story I’d told her, starting with the discovery of Jesse’s body—only she called him Hector, not Jesse, de Silva—and then going into Clive’s grandfather’s theory about his murder. She hit all the right points, hammering it home about Maria’s two-faced treachery and Diego’s overall ickiness. And without coming out and saying so in as many words, she managed to indicate that none of the couple’s offspring ever amounted to much of anything.

  Rock on, CeeCee.

  She credited all of her information to the late Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., who she claimed had been piecing together the mystery at the time of his death a few days earlier. I had a feeling that Clive, wherever he was, was going to be pleased. Not only did he come off looking like a hero for having solved a 150-year-old murder mystery, but they’d also managed to find a photo of him in which he still had most of his hair.