The priest leaned against his own bed. “My entire body is sore.”
Khoury’s white tee was dotted with blood and MacLeod pointed. “You’re bleeding, mate.”
The priest pulled up his shirtsleeve. “My stitches.”
Rossi went into the bathroom and came out with a hand towel, using it to dab at Khoury’s oozing wound. “I pulled Ryan off of you and then we both had to work to pry your mitts from the TV screen.”
“I felt his hand on me,” said MacLeod. “Heard you at the door.”
“Maid let me in,” she said.
“Couldn’t move or open my mouth.” MacLeod held up his hands, examining the fronts and backs. “No burns. I thought after an electrocution...”
“Don’t try to sell us more of your bullshit,” said Rossi. “That wasn’t a simple shock you got.”
MacLeod stood straight and tightened the belt around his bathrobe. “Samantha sweetheart...”
“The maid sent a manager to our room to check on us,” said Khoury. “While he was here, he got more calls. Every television in the Drake is out.”
“What the hell did you do?” asked Rossi.
“Wasn’t me,” said MacLeod. “I saw the girls’ photos on the telly and then everything went black.”
“There was one girl on the screen, and it wasn’t a photo,” said the priest. “She was shouting at you. She was looking directly at you and shouting.”
“Nonsense,” the Scot said with a dismissive wave. “The electrocution must have altered your memory.”
“I saw it, too,” said Rossi.
MacLeod to the ceiling: “Lord help me. They’re both loony.”
“Spill it,” said Rossi.
“You’re going to think I’m a mental.”
“Try us,” said Khoury.
MacLeod sighed and shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Tell us,” Rossi snarled.
He sighed again. “I’ve got a third eye.”
Several seconds of silence.
“S’Truth,” said the Scot. “I swear it.”
Khoury: “Explain.”
“Third eye. What does that mean, exactly?” asked Rossi. “What can you do?”
“Everything that my dear, conniving mum claimed to be able to do: Read minds. Put hands on inanimate objects and do a sort of reading of them. Out-of-body travel. Communicate with the dead, when they’re feeling talkative.”
Rossi’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve made a career of debunking that stuff.”
“Self-hatred,” said Khoury.
“That’s a tad strong, don’t you think?”
Rossi: “So when you were alone in the Sistine Chapel...”
“I was trying to get a read on the latest shadows.”
“That’s how you knew to take us to Wormwood,” said the priest.
MacLeod nodded.
Rossi looked at the black television screen. “You were trying to zero in on the girls.”
“I’d never before attempted to work my magic with a telly.”
“Didn’t work so well, did it?”
“When I started, all that was on the telly were three photos of the girls from this AMBER Alert business. I put my hand on the picture of the middle child. Babette is her name, I believe.”
“She’s the strongest,” said Khoury. “The leader.”
“Indeed,” said MacLeod. “She booted her sisters off the telly and came on all by herself, for a solo performance.”
“Did you zone in on her location?” asked Rossi. “Can you give us directions? Where are they?”
“I’m not a bloody GPS. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.” He rubbed his temples again. “If I did get a read on them, the information has been thoroughly blasted out of my head.”
“Does she know where you are?” asked Khoury. “Does it work both ways?”
“She knew I was eyeballing her. As you said: She looked directly at me, she did. Bloody eerie.”
“This from a man who converses with the dead,” said Rossi.
“I couldn’t break the connection,” MacLeod continued. “I could feel electricity - or something like it - humming through my veins. But I couldn’t take my hand off the telly.”
“Your union - or whatever you want to call it - must have disrupted all the TVs in the hotel,” said the priest.
Rossi: “I wonder...”
“What’re you thinking?” asked Khoury.
“Stay here,” she said, heading for the door.
“Where are you running off to, lass?”
She put her hand on the knob and turned around. “If Camp calls for me, stall him.”
Khoury: “Where are you going?”
“To get donuts,” she said, and disappeared out the door.
Petit convinced the abbess to let him out of jail long enough to drive to McDonald’s and pick up breakfast. After everything that had happened that morning, he couldn’t choke down anything, but he needed to get out of that motel room. Even with pint-size prison guards Cecelia and Adeline riding in the back seat, he felt the noose had been loosened.
He turned into the McDonald’s drive through and got behind a long line of cars waiting to order.
“Can we get hamburgers?” asked one of the girls.
He checked his watch. “They aren’t serving them yet.”
Grumbles of disappointment.
“They have pancakes.”
“Ick.”
“I’m sick of pancakes.”
“The nuns made a lot of pancakes, didn’t they?” he said. “They have McMuffins, though. They’re as good as hamburgers. They’re breakfast burgers.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah.”
The car ahead of them crawled forward and he did the same. His time alone with them might be a chance to get some info. “So...How’d Babette do that Lazarus thing?”
“Who’s Lazer?”
He tried to make his voice relaxed about the whole thing, as if it happened every day. Corpses sitting up and talking. “What I mean is, how’d she come back from...that long sleep? How’d she do that? Can you guys do that?”
He heard them whispering to each other. Then one asked, “Mister P?”
“Yeah, Missy?”
“Can we get iced mochas?”
“Please?”
At the same time, the abbess was following Lazarus around the motel room with a thermometer. “Are you sure you feel...”
“Leave me alone,” snapped the girl, reaching for the television controls.
“Don’t touch that!”
The girl lowered her hand and looked at the nun. Wrinkled her nose. “You smell like shampoo.”
The mother superior reached behind her head and touched the long, damp braid.
“Cut it off.”
“What?”
“Go into the bathroom and cut your ugly, stinky witch hair.”
The woman didn’t move.
The child went into the bathroom and came out with a pair of scissors. “Do it or I’ll draw more pictures – and cut them up.”
The nun’s shoulders sagged. She took the scissors and went into the bathroom.
“Close the door,” the girl yelled after her.
As soon as the door snapped shut, the girl went up to the charred box and turned it on. Smiled into the shattered screen.
Behind the television, all the cords had been yanked from the wall.
Rossi took the elevators down to the lobby and went outside. Jogged across the street, threading her way around pedestrians and nearly getting clipped by a taxi in the morning rush hour traffic. She pushed through the revolving doors of the Knickerbocker, another grand hotel, and ran up to the front desk. She didn’t have to ask. All three of the clerks were on the phone.
“I’m sorry, sir. We have no idea why they went out...”
“I apologize, ma’am. We’re looking into it...”
“Other guests are having the same problem. We’ve got a call into the...”
&nbs
p; She went back outside. To make sure the trouble wasn’t isolated to that street, she dashed the half block to Michigan Avenue. Even as she ran, she heard people on their cell phones.
“Check if the one in the family room is...”
“...and if that doesn’t do it, call the cable guy. His number’s on the...”
“Maybe it’s the remote or the...”
At the corner of Michigan Avenue and Chestnut, she ran into an electronics store on the street level of the John Hancock Center. “TVs,” she panted to a clerk.
“Second floor,” he said, thumbing over his shoulder.
Rossi jogged up the stairs and made a beeline for the television section. Rows and rows. Every maker and every size, up to home theater monsters. Every one of them had a dead screen.
Nearby, a half a dozen clerks were standing together, talking all at once.
“...said he can’t figure it out.”
“...went out all at once.”
“I can’t believe our other stores are having the same...”
“Where?” Rossi interrupted. “Where are the other stores that are having trouble?”
They stopped talking and stared at her. One of the younger ones went into sell mode. “Can I help you find something, ma’am?”
“How about a television that works?” she asked.
“Uh...”
She whipped out her ID. “How many of your stores have lost reception?”
A guy wearing a gray crew cut and a manager’s badge stepped into the circle of people. “Can I help you?”
Rossi held her wallet up to his nose. “Which of your stores had their TVs go out this morning? Where are they?”
“Was it terrorists?”
Good idea, she thought. “I can’t talk about it. National security. How many of your stores are having problems?”
“All of them,” said the manager.
“All of them in the city?”
“All of them.”
“You’re a national chain,” she said.
“All of them,” he repeated.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been on the phone with corporate,” he said. “They’ve been on the phone with Homeland Security.”
“And they all went out at exactly the same time? At every single store?”
“Our west coast stores haven’t opened yet, but they had employees inside restocking,” he said. “According to headquarters, they all reported...”
The screens suddenly lit up and Rossi’s head snapped around.
“Now what?” asked the manager.
He and Rossi and the clerks went over to a wall lined with the larger screens. At first, the only thing on display was snow. The only sound coming out of the speakers, a sizzle. Other clerks and customers gathered to stare.
“What the hell?” asked the manager.
The snow melted, giving way to a face. From top to bottom, the image filled every screen.
“Who’s that?” someone asked.
Rossi recognized her.
The massive mouth stretched into a wide, maniacal smile, and the girl sang:
“Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies! Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down!”
The screens went black again.
“Creepy,” said a customer in a suit.
Rossi ran back to the Drake. Behind the front desk, an army of clerks was taking calls. Apologizing. Trying to offer sane explanations. Apparently the girl’s face and song weren’t exclusive to the electronics store. Rossi overheard more than one guy behind the desk say, “We don’t know who she is.”
Riding the elevators up, Rossi struggled to compose herself. What sort of creature or force could control every television screen? She’d read a statistic a few years back. In the United States, some 285 million televisions were in use – and that was household sets. The number didn’t count hotels or electronic stores or sports bars or...
After Rossi got out of the elevator, a young couple with two small boys piled inside. “You can watch your show some other time,” said the woman, picking up the younger boy and balancing him on her hip.
The older boy looked up at the man and took his hand. “Daddy, who was that little girl on the TV?”
“I have no idea,” the man said tiredly.
“I don’t like her,” the boy said.
Rossi smiled to herself. Smart kid.
As another family passed Rossi in the hall, she heard them whining and complaining. The two teenagers griped that they were going to be bored in Chicago without TV and the toddler was crying about missing Barney. The parents were making noise about getting a refund from the hotel.
The United States had been unplugged for an hour and folks were already freaking out about it. Was the country really that weak and dependent? What would happen if the sets stayed off for days? Would crabby husbands and wives take knives to each other? Would kids tear up the streets? Without TV prodding people to buy, would the economy tank? What about all the jobs tied to television?
She got to the guys’ room and MacLeod opened the door. Both men had dressed, and she was glad. They were going to have to hit the road fast.
“Where did you go?” asked the Scot.
Rossi went straight for the couch and dropped down onto the cushions. She sat on her hands so they wouldn’t see them shaking. “I got news.”
“So do we,” said Khoury. “While you were gone, the television came back on for a few seconds – and you’ll never believe what was on.”
“One of the darlings, singing that nursery rhyme again.”
“How’d you know?” asked the Scot.
“The weirdness isn’t isolated to the Drake. Other TVs have...gone to the dark side.”
Both men came up to the couch and stood over her. “Where else?” asked Khoury.
“The entire country.”
The Scot and the priest each pulled a chair over and sat across from her while she continued her story. She told them where she’d run and what she’d seen, and then all three talked about what it meant. They agreed that the televisions went out because of MacLeod’s connection to the girl. While it may have alerted Babette that they were in close pursuit, it also demonstrated to her that they had some firepower on their side.
“That’s a good thing,” said Rossi. “It’ll scare her, and that should scare the abbess – and scared people make mistakes.”
Babette’s nationwide appearance on otherwise dead screens was not a good thing, they conceded.
“A public display of her power,” said Rossi. “A...I don’t know...a coming out party for her. It could make it easier for the violent few to convince the country that the girls are the devil, and that the end is near.”
Beyond the fact that it had served as Sister Rose’s dirge, the nursery rhyme itself was significant, Khoury argued. The genesis of many children’s rhymes could be traced to historic events, and the seemingly harmless words often symbolized horrific incidents, he explained.
“ ‘Mary Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’ is really about Queen Mary Tudor persecuting Protestants. Silver bells and cockleshells were instruments of torture and the pretty maids in a row were contraptions similar to guillotines. The one about Jack and Jill refers to the beheading of Marie Antoinette and her husband the king during the French Revolution. ‘Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.’ ”
Rossi: “So ‘Ring around the rosy...’ ”
“Is a red rash in the shape of a ring,” said Khoury.
“Good God,” said MacLeod, jumping to his feet. “I know this. It’s a symptom.”
“Of what?” asked Rossi.
MacLeod: “Bubonic plague.”
“It doesn’t mean that particular plague is coming,” said Rossi, trying to keep a lid on the hysteria. “And even if it is...”
“Comforting words,” said MacLeod, pacing the length of the hotel room.
“We know how to treat it,” she continued. “We’ve got a
ntibiotics.”
“Some kind of plague is coming,” said Khoury. “That’s her message.”
“Why should we believe her?” asked Rossi.
“She’s a miracle. Her sisters are miracles. Their powers obviously extend beyond healing.”
MacLeod gave a dismissive wave. “Enough about plagues and miracles. Practical question: What if the telly stays off? Your country can manage, surely?”
Rossi’s cell rang and she pulled it out of her blazer. Checked the screen. “Camp.”
“Going to spill the beans about your partner, are you?” asked MacLeod.
“I don’t know.”
“I’d rather you not. My privacy...”
“Is not at the top of my list.”
“You’ll sound bonkers,” he warned her.
“I’ve stopped worrying about that.” Rossi put the phone to her ear. “Yes, sir. I...I know. It’s stunning.” She looked at the Scot. “Tell the media...I don’t know...Can we blame it on terrorists?”
“Small, curly-headed terrorists with apple cheeks,” MacLeod muttered.
While shooting an apologetic look at MacLeod, Rossi told her superior about her partner’s abilities and what he’d done with them that morning. The Scot did seem pleased with himself when she assured Camp: “I’ve seen him in action, sir. He’s the real deal.”
MacLeod pulled down on his vest and leaned into the priest’s ear. “You’re looking at the real deal.”
“If they did kill that officer in Indiana, then they’re driving east,” Rossi said into the phone. “I have a pretty good idea what’s east, at least for the nun.”
That last sentence made the priest and MacLeod hover around Rossi until she closed her cell.
“What’s east?” asked Khoury.
Rossi told them she remembered something not in the girls’ records, but in the regular files kept in the convent office: Magdalen Xavier’s previous posting was at a cloistered convent. She couldn’t recall the location – she’d glanced at the file briefly while rifling through the cabinet – except that it was out east.
“Help me out here, Ryan,” she said as she sat at the desk with her laptop. “Run some names by me. Cloistered convents. Know any?”
“You’re intending to Google them?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Cloistered convents are cloistered. They don’t interact with the outside world except when absolutely necessary. Even then, they...”
The Devil's Own Crayons Page 30