Becca couldn’t concentrate. Even though it was a big room, Bishop’s study was stuffy. She usually kept the door closed when she was at work because she suspected it was painful for Theresa to pass by and see her in Bishop’s chair behind the desk. But it was stuffy tonight, and she had left the door ajar, hoping for a breeze that didn’t come.
She was worried about Theresa. Worried that the bites would get infected, sure, but more worried about the gray pallor to her skin and the bone weariness she saw in the old woman’s eyes even after she’d had a good night’s sleep…if any of them ever got a good night’s sleep anymore.
Leaning back in the oversized chair, she rubbed her neck, trying to massage out the stiffness. The action caused her index finger to throb. She didn’t know what she’d done to it to blacken the nail. It looked like she’d smashed it in a car door and maybe she had. She didn’t remember much about the day she’d gone to her father’s house to trade herself for Andi.
Careful of the finger, she continued to massage her stiff neck. She had pored over documents, ancient texts, papers and files almost nonstop for days and had hardly put a dent in the masses of information Bishop had collected and stored in the room over the years.
“That day he figured out how to get rid of an efreet, he said he’d noted it and wrote it out clear,” Theresa had said. It was somewhere here, a needle in a haystack.
The books and documents were journeys into a darkness the human heart and mind could not conceive. Becca read about the horror of pure evil, the deeds demonic presences had performed over the centuries, and every day she felt her grasp on the real world grow less secure. She willed herself to hold on because to lose her grip would be to slide down into that black abyss of evil and psychosis and never return.
She cried out silently in frustration.
I can’t find it. I’ve looked and looked and…I can’t keep reading his horror. Help me! Show me where—
And then she knew she was no longer alone in the room. She sensed the presence even before she lifted her head and saw it there by the door.
Just a shadow, like a wisp of dark smoke in the shape of a hooded form. Cold eyes blazed red inside the hood, but she turned her gaze away. To look into those eyes was to be lost forever.
It wasn’t real, of course. She was alone in a room, riffling through papers written by a dear old man who had given his life to save a room full of children.
That was reality. She understood that.
And it made absolutely no difference at all.
“You are condemned to remain forever in this mortal world.” The voice reminded her of the sound of tires on gravel. “Because you refuse to come home where you belong, you will be trapped in your dead body when we kill you.”
It took every speck of will Becca possessed to move her left hand over to her right, inch it, drag it against the force that held her motionless. As the figure of smoke continued to speak, she inched her left index finger under the thick rubber band around her right wrist and began to pull it tight. Slowly, she dragged it away from her skin, feeling the band dig into the flesh of her right wrist.
“You will live to feel worms eat your flesh, beetles chew your skin, rot bloat your belly and your bones turn to—”
She let go. The rubber band snapped back against her wrist with a painful sting and the creature of smoke was instantly gone. Poof.
An old wino in a shelter had taught her that trick, a woman who saw monsters, too, but not the ones Becca saw. The woman had said that sometimes a little sting was enough to bring back the real world.
Becca let out her breath in a whoosh and put her head in her hands. She burst into tears of terror and relief, and the crying covered the sound for a little while. But as soon as she calmed down, she heard it. She didn’t want to lift her head, did not want to see.
Then she heard it again, clearly. The rattle.
She slowly raised her head and stared into the dead eyes of a rattlesnake coiled right inside the door. Attached to its head was a spiderlike creature covered in bristling black hair. It had one eye and it fixed that eye on her. Then the snake uncoiled and began to slither across the floor toward her.
This was no illusion. This was real.
Theresa felt Biscuit suddenly go rigid. She was propped up in bed, trying to read her Bible but not having much success at it. She was gone have to go down to the Dollar Store and get her another pair of cheater reading glasses, maybe 2.75 this time. She’d started out with 1.50. Bishop had bought her that first pair, said he was tired of watching her wrinkle her face all squinty like every time she read the word of God.
That’d been—
The dog didn’t bark. Just lay there on the bed beside her with his ears turning around like them satellite dishes, trying to pick up a signal.
Theresa’s heart took up the beat of a kettle drum in her chest.
No more rats, Lord. Please.
Then the dog leapt off her bed and went tearing out her bedroom door and down the stairs, silently, like a mountain lion on the attack.
She hefted her bulk up out of the bed fast as she could, but she knew that whatever evil thing had invaded her house would likely do whatever it was gone do long before she could get there to stop it.
Becca jumped out of the chair and climbed on top of the desk. The snake was at the base of the desk in seconds, coiling again. She knew rattlesnakes could strike farther from a coil and this was a big one—with the superhuman strength granted it by the one-eyed spider creature attached to its head. There was nowhere in the room, nowhere in the whole house, she could climb tall enough to be out of the snake’s striking range.
She didn’t hear Biscuit coming. The dog hadn’t barked, hadn’t made a sound, was just suddenly in the room, leaping at the snake. A vicious, ugly growl rumbled from his throat as he sank his teeth deep into the creature’s body and whipped it sideways. The snake twisted in his grasp and struck at him, but Biscuit shook his head and the snake missed. He whipped it back and forth again and again, and the snake kept striking and missing.
Then Biscuit yelped, a pained, pitiful cry. The snake had buried its fangs deep in his shoulder. Biscuit jerked, tried to shake the snake off, but his legs didn’t seem to work anymore and he collapsed. The dog rolled over on his side, twitching as the snake slithered away from him and back toward Becca.
Theresa rushed fast as she could to the door of Bishop’s study that Biscuit had pushed open. She could smell the demon stink on the other side. Becca was standing on the desk and Biscuit had a snake in his teeth! A rattlesnake.
Then it bit Biscuit! And the dog tried to keep fighting, but it couldn’t. It collapsed and the snake started slithering toward Becca on the desk.
Theresa didn’t think what to do. Didn’t have to, wouldn’t have been able to, probably, even if she’d tried. It was like somebody—Bishop?—moved her arms and legs for her.
The old woman took two steps into the room, reached up above the bulletin board on the wall by the door and lifted the scimitar down off the rack. The motion knocked the board loose and it crashed to the floor, sending out a spray of papers and Post-it notes and pushpins around it.
Theresa raised the blade high above her head and brought it down in a great chopping motion that severed the snake into two pieces neat as slicing a knife through a ripe tomato.
What was left of it turned toward her, tried to bunch up to come after her but didn’t have enough body left to coil. She lifted the blade again and this time when she brought it down it severed the head off the snake—clean, left the rest of the body twitching.
Then Theresa dropped the blade and got down on the floor beside Biscuit. She had trouble with her knees, they didn’t bend good, but she knelt beside the animal anyway and they bent fine.
The dog was breathing in short, gasping breaths. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he was twitching a little, like the dead snake. She’d seen folks after a rattlesnake had bitten them—that day years ago when a coffin full of poisonous snakes had attacked a crowd. She knew wasn’t no way that dog could survive—then Biscuit breathed a great shuddering sigh and was still.
Becca hopped down off the desk and knelt beside Theresa and the dead dog.
“Oh, Biscuit,” she cried, and reached out a hand to stroke the fur on his belly. The dog liked to have his belly stroked, would roll over on his back, and look up at Becca with big pleading eyes that said, don’t stop, don’t stop.
Theresa gathered the animal up in her arms and rocked him like he was a baby, back and forth, tears streaming down her cheeks and dripping into his fur.
Becca rose slowly to her feet and surveyed the room, shuddering at the pieces of dead snake that had left bloody trails on the floor.
The severed head of the snake had come to rest beside the pile of papers that had cascaded out from the bulletin board when it crashed to the floor. In fact, the fangs had stuck in something. Like twin pushpins, they affixed a lone yellowed Post-it note to the floor.
Becca stepped slowly closer. Then she began to tremble. She could make out Bishop’s handwriting on the note. She leaned over and read his words, only a handful, and she knew this was what she’d been looking for.
Jack was jarred so abruptly from sleep by the banging sound he was momentarily disoriented, couldn’t remember where he was or what he was doing there. Even so, he looked down and saw his pistol in his hand. He’d reached up instinctively and snatched it out of the holster he’d left hanging on the bedpost. Well, wherever he was, he was armed!
Then it all flooded back. The motel room. Andi. He glanced over to the bed where she was asleep.
Andi wasn’t there!
He heard her voice then, from outside the door. She was the one banging on it.
“Uncle Jack, open the door. Hurry!”
He leapt out of the bed, stepped to the door and pulled it open.
“Andi, what are you doing out—?”
“You have to come now.” She grabbed his hand and yanked him toward the parking lot. “There’s a little girl—her name’s Ariel—she’s hurt really bad. You have to help.”
“What are you talking about? And what are you doing out—?”
“Please,” she pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything, all about it, but right now you have to come with me—hurry.”
Jack didn’t have to dress. With Andi in the room with him—and he certainly wasn’t going to allow the child to stay in her father’s empty room all by herself!—he slept in sweatpants and a Fraternal Order of Police T-shirt. He stepped back into the room, shoved the gun down the back of his pants, his feet into his shoes—no socks, snatched up his cell phone and followed Andi.
She had his hand and was dragging him toward the fence on the other side of the parking lot like a big dog pulling at a leash.
“Hurry!” she said, then stopped and raced back across the lot. She dug in her pocket and pulled out—his car keys!—punched the unlock button, opened the passenger side door and grabbed the flashlight out of the glove box.
She turned it on as she ran back toward him, then plunged ahead of him into the dark woods.
“I found her at the bottom of a cliff,” she said. “This way!” And she raced off into the darkness.
The flashlight was locked in the car…so how had she found somebody in the dark woods without it?
Following Andi in the darkness was like trying to keep up with a firefly. She darted ahead, a bobbing light here and there. He stumbled along behind, tripping over roots and stubbing his toe on rocks.
Andi pulled up so sharply in front of him he almost ran into her.
“There!” She pointed with the flashlight down into a rocky creek bed where a little girl lay crumpled on the ground.
Jack climbed down the rocky embankment and knelt beside the child. She was lying so still he couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. He was reaching out to feel for the carotid artery in her neck when her huge blue eyes popped open.
“Where did she go?” she whispered, her voice so soft and weak he could barely hear her.
“Her name’s Ariel Murphy,” Andi said. “She fell from up there.” Andi pointed the flashlight to the ridge above them. “Her leg’s broken, and maybe other stuff, too.” She shone the light on the child’s body, where her right leg was twisted at an impossible angle.
Since Jack didn’t know if there was such a thing as “dial 911” in a town as small as Bradford’s Ridge, he pulled out his phone and punched “call back” on the last number. He’d spoken to the sheriff only a couple of hours ago when he’d called to let Jack know that Ed Blackwell, the deputy attacked by Rusty Willis, had died.
Sheriff Lincoln answered on the first ring, totally alert.
“Andi found a little girl in the woods—badly hurt. I’ll send Andi back to the motel parking lot to lead you here—you’d never find us on your own. I’ll stay here with Ariel.”
“Ariel?” the sheriff asked. “That’s the little girl? Ariel Murphy?”
Then it hit Jack, too. Ariel Murphy was the child who’d pulled up the rosebushes in the sheriff’s yard. She was one of the three children who were possessed.
Andi and the light bobbed off into the darkness and Jack settled himself on the ground beside the little girl, sitting with his legs crossed Indian style, holding her small cold hand. He didn’t dare touch her anywhere else since he had no idea what other injuries she might have. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the darkness with no flashlight glare, Jack could make out the features of the child lying still beside him, her eyes closed.
She seemed so badly hurt she couldn’t possibly move, but Jack remained alert. He’d fought a man juiced up by a demon once and the fact that this was a little girl didn’t matter in the least. If she could tear rosebushes out of the ground, she was fully capable of ripping his head off his shoulders.
How in the world had Andi—?
The child spoke, or he thought she did, but he couldn’t hear her. He leaned over until his face was only inches from hers.
“What?”
“It’s gone now,” the child said. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. Clearly, she was in shock. “It’s still cold, though. So cold.”
He knew then. There was only a little girl lying dirty and broken on the ground. He could not have said how he knew, but he was certain there was no other presence here.
The night air was cold, but Jack knew that kind of chill was not what the little girl was talking about. Still, he pulled his T-shirt off over his head and snuggled it around the child the best he could. It was only cotton, but his body heat was in it.
“That better?”
Her eyes were closed and she didn’t speak again.