Andi hadn’t wanted to go. She liked school and never wanted to miss. But the most important reason she didn’t want to go was Ossy. Daddy called him the MIA cat, but she had forgotten what the letters stood for. All she knew was that she hadn’t seen him since before they went to Miss Theresa’s house Wednesday evening, day before yesterday. Even though Daddy kept saying the cat was fine, she was beginning to get really worried.
Daddy had left big bowls of food and water for him in the laundry room and said Ossy’d be snoozing on Andi’s window seat when they returned. She hoped so.
She got in the backseat behind Uncle Jack, and before she scooted over to the other side to sit behind Daddy, she caught a whiff of Uncle Jack’s Old Spice aftershave. He wore it every day. Daddy wore different kinds, but Uncle Jack always wore the same one. She could imagine the bottle all by itself in his medicine cabinet. Major Crocker got in behind Uncle Jack and immediately challenged her to a game of rock, paper, scissors.
“When I was a little boy, my mother was so overprotective she only let me play rock, paper,” he said.
Daddy and Uncle Jack laughed, but Andi didn’t understand what was funny about that.
Then the two men in the front started talking about politics—nominations and conventions and things she didn’t understand. She caught the name Chapman Whitworth, though—it gave her chills—when Uncle Jack said he and all the other candidates would be speaking on Monday at the Better Day Society dinner in Lancaster. Lancaster was the place you passed by when you took the paddleboat cruise on the Star of Cincinnati—the place where all the rich people lived in gigantic riverfront houses.
“The Better Day Society gets points for having a sense of humor, at least,” Daddy said. “I gave the invocation at the dinner a couple of years ago. The community service awards they give to individuals are plaques, but the plaque they give every year to some business for being a good corporate neighbor is attached to a gold-plated manhole cover.”
“Seriously?” Uncle Jack asked.
Daddy nodded. “The last Monday in October falls on the thirty-first this year,” Daddy said. “So the dinner’s going to be a Halloween costume ball.”
“They ought to ask all the candidates to dress as monsters. Whitworth wouldn’t have to buy an outfit.”
Andi spotted a herd of cattle as they passed a field.
“Daddy, why are some of the cows spotted and others solid black? Are there solid white ones and they marry solid black ones and their babies are the spotted ones?”
“If it worked like that, honey, Uncle Jack could marry a white woman and they’d have spotted babies.”
Andi giggled at that thought.
“I’d like to be a spotted person,” she said. “But not boring black and white spots. I’d want purple and orange ones.”
She played a game on her iPad, then leaned her head against the window, nodded off and slept for a while. When she woke, she bit her tongue before she asked, “Are we there yet?” She didn’t want to sound like some annoying little kid in a TV show. She saw a sign up ahead that proclaimed “Welcome to Caverna County, Kentucky,” so it couldn’t be far, but she wasn’t sure how long she could wait.
“Can we stop soon? I need to go to the bath—” But she didn’t finish her sentence. They had rounded a curve in the winding road past the sign, into a valley between mountains that looked like they’d been splattered with yellow and red and gold paint. But the autumn colors weren’t what she was staring at.
“It’s only a little farther now. Can you wait—? What is it, Andi? What’s wrong?”
Uncle Jack had been looking at her with his rearview mirror and Daddy turned around in his seat.
“Andi, what’s the matter?” Daddy asked.
Andi didn’t know how to tell them what was wrong because she wasn’t sure herself. She stared at it, trying to figure out what it was. Was it fog? No, fog was a light gray; this was black. Couldn’t be a storm, either, because storm clouds were up high in the sky, and besides, this darkness wasn’t coming from the sky down, it was going from the ground up. Smoke, then, from a fire. Not one fire, though—a whole bunch of them. Streams of smoke were rising into the air all around to form a puddle of darkness that hung over the valley between the mountains and spread out in all directions. It was moving, swirling slowly around like those satellite pictures of hurricanes.
“Andi…?” She could hear the concern in Uncle Jack’s voice.
They rounded another bend and Andi saw the place where one of the smoke streams was coming from. There was a hole in the mountain next to a huge white rock that stuck out into a river. Even though the hole was plugged up by rocks, black something flowed out of it and rose into the sky. But it wasn’t smoke. It was just…dark.
“There!” she managed to sputter and pointed at the rock as they passed by it. Then she turned around in her seat to look back at it.
“Milkstone?” her father said.
“What’s—” Major Crocker began.
“It’s a big rock in the river that forms a pool where teenagers drink and party—at least they used to,” Uncle Jack said.
When Andi turned back around to face front, she spotted where another black stream rose from behind a stand of trees on the other side of the road, and another lifting up from the mountain farther down.
“There’s dark…smoke or a cloud or…there’s black in the sky,” she said, understanding now that this was like the demons she could see and other people couldn’t.
The car had reached the outer edge of the black cloud and Andi cringed away from the window as they passed into the gloom. It grew darker all around her and she suddenly felt frightened for no reason at all.
“I don’t see anything,” Major Crocker said. “Describe it to me.”
But that was the thing—she didn’t know the words to describe what she saw or explain how it made her feel. As they traveled deeper into the growing shadow, Andi tried to see what it was, exactly. But it wasn’t anything at all. Just “not light.” Dark and gloomy. And scary.
“It’s like…you know, in a dark room you turn on just one lamp and it lights everything around it, but not the whole room.”
Uncle Jack nodded his head but kept his eyes on the road.
“This is the opposite. It’s like you’re in a bright room and someone turns on a lamp only what comes out of the lamp is darkness. It doesn’t make the whole room dark, but around the lamp…”
That didn’t make sense, so she tried again.
“It’s like shadows are flowing up from holes in the ground into the sky. The dark is hanging there in a puddle, getting thicker and thicker, blotting out the sun.”
Daddy’s voice was soft, and he and Uncle Jack exchanged a look that frightened her almost as much as the sky because the two of them looked scared, too.
“She sees darkness coming out of the caves,” Daddy said.
Jack parked in a tight space between two pickup trucks in front of the Caverna County Courthouse on Main Street in Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky. They had an appointment to talk to Caverna County Sheriff Hezekiah Lincoln—the man who had told Jack about the strange occurrences in the county and about the children he thought might be responsible for them.
It was late on a busy Friday afternoon—which was court day, from the look of it, so a steady stream of mangy-looking people climbed the wide concrete steps to the big metal doors on the front of the building. They joined farmers paying taxes, teenagers paying speeding tickets and the ladies who gathered in the Home Extension Agent’s office on the top floor of the building to quilt, knit and gossip.
Daniel and Jack got out of the car. Crock got out of the backseat on Jack’s side, but Andi sat still for a moment, like maybe she was reluctant to step out into darkness that only she could see. Daniel opened her door from the outside and she sat for a moment, then edged out of the car.
Jack was looking right at her, shaking his head, or he wouldn’t have seen it happen. The cat came out of nowhere. It streaked into Jack’s field of vision from the right, dashing across the street toward the back of his car. And Andi.
The cat’s hackles were raised, its ears flattened and its teeth bared in a vicious snarl. It never broke stride, just launched itself into the air in an impossible leap that struck Andi in the chest, knocking her backward into her opened car door. The cat clung to her pink sweater with the claws on its hind feet and left paw while it swiped at her face with the claws on the right. Andi shrieked and Jack reached out to shove Crock, who hadn’t seen it, out of the way so he could get to her. But a big farmer in bib overalls got there first. Likely the owner of the pickup truck they were parked beside, he was standing by the truck, waiting for Andi and Daniel to close their doors so he could open his and get in. The man took two steps, reached out huge hands and grabbed the animal, yanking it off Andi’s chest.
“What in the Sam Hill—?” he sputtered.
The cat writhed and twisted, turning so it could claw at the man’s arms. When it sank its sharp fangs into a knuckle on his left hand, the farmer responded instinctively—slamming the cat down as hard as he could on the trunk of the car. It clung to him still until he smashed his right fist in a hammer blow downward, crushing the cat’s head against the metal of the trunk. The animal went limp, but was still twitching when he flung it off his arm onto the street behind the car, where a foot wearing lace-up shoes stomped it hard. The foot was Crock’s. The animal lay still then, sprawled on its back, blood streaming out of its mouth, nose and ears.
That was the first good look Jack got of the animal, and when he saw it clearly, he felt bile rise into the back of his throat. It was Andi’s cat, Ossy. No doubt about it. Though it was muddy and bunged up, with cockleburs clinging to its coat and a scabbed-over hunk missing from its right ear, it was definitely Ossy. The patch of black fur around his right eye like the Victrola bulldog and the two perfectly white feet and legs like he was wearing gym socks—it was Ossy all right.
How did Ossy get here?
Andi had recognized him, too, and was clinging to her father, crying, “Ossy! Ossy!” as she sobbed, blood seeping from the scratches gouged into her cheek. Daniel peeled her off and held her out at arm’s length, inspecting, making sure there weren’t injuries he couldn’t see.
“Anybody got a handkerchief?” Daniel asked the crowd that had by that time gathered around the back of the car. “Any kind of cloth I can—?”
A portly woman produced a handful of tissues out of her purse, leaned toward Andi and began to wipe gently at her face with them.
“That cat attacked the little girl, come up out of nowhere,” the woman said to nobody in particular.
“Are you all right?” Jack asked the farmer, who was holding his injured hand and arm to his body.
“Do I look all right?” the man said. “That thing just leapt on her—?”
“Wouldja look at that!” exclaimed a voice out of the crowd. “That’s a male calico.”
“There’s no such thing as a male calico cat,” said someone else.
“Well, I’m looking at one,” said the first voice. “See for yourself.”
It was clear the cat sprawled on its back on the asphalt was both male and a calico.
“Well, then that’s what was wrong with it. A male calico cat’d have to be so screwed up inside, it’d go crazy,” said the first voice.
“That cat’s rabid,” said another voice. “I seen a rabid fox do that once, come running out of the woods all crazy like, run in circles then tore into one of my pigs. I had to shoot it.”
“The fox?” asked the man next to him.
“The fox and the pig—couldn’t even eat the meat. You folks is gonna have to get rabies shots or those bites’ll kill you.”
Jack knew the cat wasn’t rabid. It wasn’t disease that had driven the animal to violence.
Someone had gone to get the sheriff, or he had heard the ruckus and came to investigate. A stocky man, broad and thick, he pushed through the crowd, trailing two deputies behind him.
“Rabid cat attacked that little girl, Linc,” came a voice out of the crowd. “But Joe Prather got him good.”
The sheriff surveyed the situation and Jack suspected he picked up on everything that’d happened and maybe even had some inkling what it all meant. Behind the affable, hound-dog face was a keen mind Jack respected. Any man smart enough to realize he didn’t have all the answers was on an intellectual level way above the average person.
“Go get a sack,” the sheriff said to one of the deputies who’d come out of the courthouse with him. “We need to send this cat off to the state lab to get it tested.”
He looked into Jack’s eyes when he spoke next. “Wouldn’t want these folks to go through rabies shots if they don’t have to, if maybe there was some other reason this cat acted like it did.”
Jack and Crock sat in Sheriff Lincoln’s cluttered office, in straight-backed chairs beside filing cabinets drooling paperwork onto the floor. Andi was perched on the edge of the sheriff’s desk while Daniel applied Band-Aids to her face. When they finally got the child calmed down, it was clear the farmer, Joe Prather, had taken the brunt of the cat’s fury. Andy had scratches down her left cheek—painful, but only scratches. It could have been a lot worse.
“You want to tell me what that was all about out there?” the sheriff said.
“That was Andi’s cat, Ossy,” Jack said, his voice flat.
“Ossy?”
“For Curiosity…a male calico,” Daniel said.
“You brought your cat down here and it attacked—?”
“We didn’t bring it.”
“If you didn’t, who did?”
“From the look of it, I don’t imagine anybody did,” Crock said. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small vial filled with cinnamon toothpicks and popped one into his mouth, wallowing it from side to side as he spoke. “You see what a mess it was—mud and stickers, the pads on its front paws were worn down and bleeding.”
Its front paws—the ones wearing white gym socks.
“Are you telling me that cat walked all the way here from Cincinnati?” the sheriff said. “Even as the crow flies, that’s more’n a hundred miles.”
“Might have hitched a ride on something for a time,” Crock said. “But yeah, I figure it walked most of the way.”
“Are you sure that’s your cat?” the sheriff asked Andi.
“Uh-huh.” Andi sounded small and terribly sad. “My sweet Ossy. And I saw it, too. Like a bug, had legs all up and down its sides, but it was slimy, sticky-looking like the trails a snail leaves on the sidewalk.”
The sheriff opened his mouth, then closed it again and said nothing.
“It was on the cat’s back, riding it, with claws all stuck in…” She shuddered.
“What I can’t figure is why,” Daniel said. “Ossy didn’t have to walk a hundred miles to attack Andi. He slept in the bed with her every night.”
Andi shot him a surprised glance and Daniel looked like he’d “let the cat out of the bag” about something.
“Maybe he did have to,” Jack said. “Remember the bright lights at Theresa’s. Andi might have been…protected in Cincinnati.”
“But not here?”
“Maybe it’s too dark here.” Jack shrugged and ended the speculation with a curt, “It’s over now. We’ll keep a better eye out from now on.”
“There are others out there—everywhere, all around,” Andi said in a hollow whisper. “It’s dark here and I can almost see them, but when I turn to look, they slink back into the shadows.”
Daniel plastered a smile on his face like putting on a stick-on name tag. “How about I buy you a milkshake—any flavor you want.” The enthusiasm in his voice rang as hollow as an empty oil drum. “There’s a drugstore across the street with an old-fashioned soda fountain…”
He looked a question at the sheriff.
“It’s still there,” the sheriff said, his good cheer as forced as Daniel’s. “And they’re open until seven thirty. They make the best milkshakes you ever tasted.”
Andi looked like she’d rather eat paint than drink a milkshake right then, but she obediently hopped down off the desk, took Daniel’s hand and the two left the office.
As soon as they were alone, Lincoln fired the question. “What did that little girl mean when she said she could see a slimy thing on the cat?”
Jack shot Crock a glance.
“As the newest member of this traveling spook show, let me tell you something,” Crock said. “It really is true there are some things in life you are better off not knowing.”
“As a charter member,” Jack said, “I can testify that the ‘normal world,’ where you don’t see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, pulling levers and pushing buttons, is a way better place to live.”
Lincoln looked from Jack to Crock, his face thoughtful. “But the trouble with that thinking is it ignores reality—even if it’s a reality most people can’t see. And it doesn’t square up with Scripture.”
Jack and Crock exchanged a look.
“I’m not a particularly religious man, but I was raised a good Pentecostal boy and I know who’s the prince of this world. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
Jack slowly nodded.
“Let’s hear it, then.”
“I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest Condensed version,” Jack said. “A demon, a powerful one called an efreet, was somehow summoned into the world here in Caverna County. It’s somewhere down in the caves. We found it when we were kids and got rid of it somehow, but those memories are gone. Now, it has come back. We have to find it again and send it back where it came from.”
Jack held up his hand before the sheriff could respond. “Don’t ask. I have no idea how we do that, but I’m taking this on faith that there is a way and we’ll figure out what it is when the time comes. But we can’t do anything until we find the efreet.”
“You know it’s in the caves, but you don’t know where?” the sheriff asked.
“Can we take a time-out here?” Crock said. “Jack has said there are miles and miles of caves under this county, but surely they’ve been explored—at least some of them—over the years. Isn’t there a map somewhere—?”
“No map,” the sheriff said. “It’s like a honeycomb under our feet. There’s not just one level, but layers and layers, going down nobody knows how far.”
“And it changes,” Jack said. “They’re limestone caves formed by underground rivers. The water’s still dissolving the rock. This whole county is riddled with sinkholes where some poor farmer’s south forty collapsed ten feet or fifty feet when a cave roof below it gave way.”
“Folks know the caves are there and maybe have ventured a few hundred yards down into the nearest one of them. Teenage boys, mostly.”
“So this efreet could be anywhere,” Crock said.
“Three little kids here in Bradford’s Ridge know where,” Jack said.
“And they know because…?”
“Because they’re possessed by demons,” Jack said. The sheriff flinched, like he’d taken an invisible blow. “You have to be in the presence of the efreet for that to happen.”
“And you want to talk to them, see if you can get them to tell you where it is?” Lincoln asked.
“Eventually, yes, but they won’t willingly tell me anything. The demons that control them are smarter than that. I want to find out where they live. They’re kids. They can’t get in a car and drive thirty miles across the county to keep an appointment with a monster. Wherever this thing is, it’s some place those kids could get to on their own. Somewhere Daniel and Becca and I could have ridden to on our bikes. That’s where we need to start. Do you have a big map of the county?”
When Daniel returned with Andi and chocolate milkshakes for Jack, Crock and the sheriff an hour later, they were in the basement file room of the courthouse. A large map of Caverna County marked up with Magic Markers was spread out on a table.
“Making any progress?” Daniel asked.
“I guess you could call it progress,” Jack said. “We’ve excluded all these areas.” He pointed to large sections of the map.
“But we’ve included all these,” Crock said, indicating equally large areas encircled in black lines.
Jack explained that two of the children were cousins with family members scattered all over the county. One’s parents were divorced—two homes, two locations.
“Those kids could have been in a cave in any one of a dozen places—all of which would have been accessible to you and Becca and me on our bikes.”
“So you’re saying…?”
“We need more information. Which means”—he glanced at Crock—“we’re going to have to exercise our interrogation skills on three small children whose bodies have been taken over by evil.”
“Goody,” Crock said.
The sheriff said he’d try to get the children to his office in the morning. As they were filing out, the sheriff touched Jack’s arm. When Jack turned, it was clear the sheriff didn’t want to say what he was about to say.
“When y’all are talking to the locals, you might want to let the others ask the questions,” he said.
Jack had no idea what he meant.
“My deputies have figured out who you are. Word spreads fast in a small town.”
Jack felt a wrecking ball slam into his belly and he was left so breathless it was a moment before he could speak.
“Twin Oaks,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
The sheriff nodded. “Lots of people in this county lost relatives in that fire,” he said. “They won’t take kindly to a man under suspicion for setting it.”
Jack could see in Sheriff Lincoln’s eyes the same thing he’d seen in the eyes of the officers he served with in Cincinnati. They all wanted him to deny the charge that he’d taken gasoline into the nursing home minutes before it burst into flame. They’d believe him if he said so, even though there was a security camera video that proved it. But he had to disappoint the sheriff, as he had his fellow officers. He couldn’t say he didn’t do it because maybe he did.
Jack turned wordlessly and left.