Andi and Sheriff Lincoln exited the elevator. Though Ariel’s room was right across from the elevator and stairs, the sheriff led Andi past it to the center of the long hallway where the nurses’ station sat in a pool of light in the otherwise dim stretch of linoleum. Andi waited impatiently as he explained to the only nurse there, whose nose was as sharp as an ax blade, that they’d not yet been able to locate the family of the little girl in room number 201, and did his best to convince her that it would do no harm to allow Andi to sit quietly with her.
“The little Murphy girl ought to be in intensive care and no visitors are allowed in the ICU,” said Hatchet Face. “But the ICU is full, so she has a nurse in her room for around-the-clock care, which makes us shorthanded out here until we can send her to Louisville—” she looked almost apprehensively out the window at the far end of the hallway, where lightning torched the sky—“when the storm clears.” She shook her head in wonder. “It came up so fast—did you see it? One minute the sky was cloudless and the next…”
Concerned at first that the ugly nurse would turn her away, Andi listened in growing respect as the sheriff “gently” threw his weight around, and before she knew it, Hatchet Face was agreeing.
“She won’t even know you’re there,” the nurse told Andi. “But the morphine she received when she got here should be wearing off by now, so she could be hovering on the edge of consciousness—don’t disturb her. If she does begin to come around, Nurse Jankowski will ask you to leave.”
“Don’t listen to what that nurse said,” the sheriff told her as they walked back toward the elevator and Ariel’s room. “Nobody knows what somebody who’s unconscious can or can’t hear or see. You go in there and talk quiet to her like you would if she was awake. Let her know she’s not alone.”
They stopped in front of Ariel’s room. “I need to go out to my cruiser to use the radio, see if my deputies have had any luck locating her grandparents. But your Uncle Jack and Major Crocker will be outside here in the hallway or down in the cafeteria when you’re done.”
Andi pushed open the door—one of those awful hospital doors that tried to keep you out if you weren’t big enough to push it hard—stepped inside and felt the door swish soundlessly shut behind her.
Thunder rumbled outside the window and rain attacked the glass like it was trying to break in to the room. Andi shivered, grateful it hadn’t been raining when Ariel was lying out there in the woods. Hurt as badly as she’d been and then cold and wet—she might have died right there where she had fallen.
The sight of Ariel there in the dirt had broken Andi’s heart, and for the first time ever she was not afraid of the ugly green slimy thing on Ariel’s shoulders. She was mad at it.
It wasn’t angry at her, though. It was scared of her. Well, maybe not of her, but definitely of the shining white light of Princess Buttercup beside her.
Ariel’s was a double room, but nobody was in the bed beside the door. Ariel barely made a lump in the bed against the far wall. The only light in the room came from the glow of the muted television mounted near the ceiling on the wall opposite the bed. Its flickering brightness danced across the sheets. Ariel was attached by tubes to machines and bottles hanging from IV stands at the head of her bed. Her right leg was all wrapped up—must have been ice packs of some kind—and suspended in a sling above the bed.
The nurse was sitting in the shadows near the foot of the bed beyond the spill of light. Andi was afraid she would try to keep her away, but she said nothing as Andi walked quietly from the door to the chair beside the bed. As with Theresa, Andi didn’t sit in the chair, just used it as a stepping stool so she could climb up and sit on the edge of the bed.
She reached out and took Ariel’s hand. It was icy cold. She had to look closely to be certain the crisp white sheet was moving at all. Her eyes were adjusting to the dim light and now she could make out shapes and forms in the darkness.
The sheriff had said to talk.
“You were real scared, weren’t you? I know how that feels, being so scared you’re afraid you’re going to throw up. I felt like that once.”
When the bad man had come into the church and said he was going to shoot her or shoot her mother, and her mother had stepped up and told him he better shoot her because he would have to kill her anyway if he tried to hurt Andi. Then her mother had taken her to the choir robe closet and shoved her inside, leaning near to tell her, “When I close this door, you run! And hide somewhere he’ll never find you.”
She had run, bounded up the ladder into the pageant storage room the stupid man didn’t know was there and hid in a basket. She’d heard a gunshot from the sanctuary but wouldn’t believe, couldn’t believe…She’d been so scared.
“But you’re okay now,” Andi said. “You won’t ever be alone…locked inside with…You’re safe now. I promise.”
She heard a sound from the nurse at the foot of the bed, who had probably dozed off and only now realized Andi was there. She might try to make Andi leave after all.
But it was a grunt, like a small bark of laughter. Andi turned and could see her now. Her head was plopped back onto the chair back. The front of her uniform was stained red where blood had gushed down the front of it from the gory red gash on her neck that looked like a smile.
Then she heard a little girl’s giggle.
The man who turned to face Jeff Kendrick was ordinary in every respect. He was dressed in a proper pin-striped suit, coat buttoned, French blue shirt and the obligatory red power tie.
He was a reasonably good-looking man, well groomed, with a distinguishing scar. Jeff couldn’t see from the door, but he was certain Whitworth’s nails had been manicured and his shoes were polished to a shine you could see your face in.
He looked like he looked on television. Except when he was on television you couldn’t see the winged shadow that rose up to the ceiling behind him, the gigantic bat-like shape that was made out of darkness. It wasn’t a form you could see. It was a black hole in the universe you couldn’t see through.
Then it opened eyes made of flames and looked at Jeff, and Jeff tried to scream, but the sight gut-punched him so hard it knocked the wind out of him.
The creature rumbled, words came from its fanged mouth that were more a roaring sound than syllables, a hoary, rasping noise that tore at Jeff’s ears, banged into him and knocked him backward. Except he didn’t move.
“You pathetic fool!” the creature said.
Suddenly, Jeff’s nose was bleeding. He could feel the blood running down his upper lip, a great flood of it, across his mouth and down his chin, where it plopped in red teardrops on the brand-new shirt he had bought just for this occasion at Macys.
The same time he’d bought the suit. The suit that had a gun in the pocket.
He tried to wrench his will back out of the grasp of the thing on the other side of the room that hung in the air above the ordinary-looking man who was smiling in amusement, as if he knew the punchline of a joke and you didn’t. Knew that the joke was on you.
Then he felt his hand moving slowly toward his coat pocket. But he wasn’t moving it. The hand slipped inside and drew out the Beretta M9 and raised it slowly until it was pointed at Chapman Whitworth’s chest.
Whitworth’s smile broadened and Jeff felt his hand begin to turn. He tried to resist this time, grunting with the effort to keep his arm pointed forward with the gun aimed at Whitworth. He held his muscles as tight as he could, felt a thin sheen of sweat break out on his forehead. But it was like being in an arm-wrestling match with a forklift. He didn’t have a chance, and finally, he gave up, panting, and watched in fascination as his hand pointed the gun at his own face.
The hand moved slowly forward and he felt his mouth begin to open, pried open the way his mother used to do when he refused to take the foul-tasting medicine that was administered every time the color, texture or nature of his bowel movements didn’t satisfy her. Pressure applied right at the jaw joint, so no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t keep your jaws clamped shut. He didn’t even try to resist this time. He felt the hand that was no longer his own place the barrel of the gun in his open mouth. The gun barrel was as cold as death.
“Pathetic fool.” The same words, but not from the creature this time. In fact, the darkness of the creature had dissolved into an amorphous shadow behind the man in the pin-striped suit who had spoken in the melodious tones that mystified and mesmerized everyone who heard them.
Jeff wasn’t mesmerized. In fact, he wasn’t even frightened anymore. And when the hand that wasn’t his own thumbed back the hammer on the pistol, he relaxed altogether.
Game over.
Jack felt a headache curl up behind his right eye. He needed more coffee. Caffeine would help. An Aspirin would help, too, and he was in a hospital. But there were so many thoughts ahead of “take an Aspirin” in the queue of his mind, he couldn’t possibly get to it until after Christmas.
Jeff Kendrick. In the grand scheme of things, he was small potatoes. If the dude who’d been shacking up with Daniel’s wife went off the deep end, well…nobody’d invited him to the party in the first place.
Jack felt instantly contrite. Jeff had saved Becca’s and Theresa’s lives, kept Billy Ray from killing them. And he was, after all, on their side.
He sighed, pushed his chair back and rose, looked at the rain pouring down outside and shivered—not from cold.
“Can he do that?” Crock cocked his chin toward the windows. “That…thing. Can he control the weather, make it—?”
“I guess he can. He is.”
“I don’t know about you, Jack, but I am feeling major outgunned here.” Crock flinched and looked down at the spot where a big bandage bloated the leg of his pants. “When he can use little kids…”
Yeah, little kids. Ariel. Perhaps she had regained consciousness. It was time to find out.
He avoided the elevator, of course. Something had happened to him when he was a kid that had left him with raging claustrophobia, but Jack couldn’t remember what it was. And that was one of a hoard of memories he wasn’t looking forward to recovering. He shoved open the stairway door beside the elevator and stepped into the bilious glow of the yellow light high overhead. His footfalls echoed with a particularly lonely sound against the concrete walls. He stepped in a small puddle of water, turned the corner and started up the stairs to the second floor. Then he stopped and looked carefully at the steps.
A small pool of water, black in the yellow light, decorated every step. All the way up. Not large puddles, the marks of someone with big feet. He followed the little puddles up the steps to the landing, where the steps switched back to continue upward. From there he could see that the little puddles didn’t turn the corner with the stairs for the third floor. They stretched out uniformly across the landing to the second-floor door.
And then Jack was running, bounding up the final stairs. He yanked open the door into the hallway, where the glow from an empty nurses’ station spilled down toward him from the center of the building. The puddles of water didn’t turn down the hallway toward the station, though. He knew they wouldn’t. They stretched out across the hall to the doorway of room 201.
Jack leapt across the hall and shoved open the door. The room was dark. The spill of light from the dim hallway only stretched as far as the first bed in the double room. It was empty. But there were shapes in the darkness beyond it.
“Close the door, Jack,” said a voice out of the black. A child’s voice, only it wasn’t a child speaking.
“Should you pull the trigger, do you think? Kill yourself?”
Chapman Whitworth spoke the words as he crossed the room to stand in front of where a statue of Jeff Kendrick held the barrel of a pistol in his mouth. The dark shadow had melted away. Almost melted away. Maybe he was imagining it, but Jeff seemed to see a thin darkness around the man, as if his form had been outlined in Magic Marker. He wasn’t as tall as Jeff. He seemed bigger on television.
Whitworth cocked his head to one side. “You’re not afraid, are you.”
It wasn’t a question, but even if it had been, Jeff couldn’t have answered it with a gun barrel stuck halfway down his throat.
“You don’t appear to care one way or the other whether you live or die. Interesting. Now, why would that be?”
He studied Jeff, like a mountain lion regarding his prey before he pounces.
“That woman, Daniel Burke’s wife, who committed adultery with you—what was her name? Oh, yes. Emily. Surely you didn’t actually care when my Victor Alexander blew out her skull and splattered her brain all over the floor—did you?”
Jeff screamed silently at him.
“Or were you so terribly upset by the visit my friends paid you last night?”
Out of the corner of his eye Jeff spotted a lone cockroach—huge, five or six inches long and three inches across—crawl up onto the back side of the white tablecloth of the nearest table and stop in the middle of a shiny white plate, its antenna twitching. The shudder of revulsion started in Jeff’s chest even before the bug scuttled off the plate and began to crawl down the front side of the tablecloth. He was frozen in place, couldn’t move, but the shudders racked his body like seizures as the bug crossed the floor toward him. He could watch it with his eyes without turning his head, but lost sight of it a few feet from his shoe because his body blocked his view.
He felt it, though. Felt the movement of it as it climbed up his pants leg and across his shirt, felt its stickery feet on his neck as it crawled from his shoulder to the top of his head. Then it crawled down his forehead to his face. Jeff was shrieking inside his head, in unreserved hysteria, making no sound at all. He tried to shut his eyes so he couldn’t see it. But he could no longer control his eyelids.
So he watched its progress as it crawled down his left cheek and back up the other side. It stopped beneath his right eye and shoved its head between his eyelid and eyeball, looking for a way to crawl in, got part of its body up to its front legs into the space, its stickery feet scratching his eyeball. His eyes flooded with tears as it pulled back out and crawled onto the barrel of the gun stuck in his mouth, went over his hand and followed the barrel to his lips. He could feel its head nudging his lips aside so it could crawl inside. Tears of horror—and pain from his scratched eyeball—slid down his face and slathered his cheeks. The bug got most of its body into his mouth, all but the very end. He could feel it exploring in there, stickery legs on the insides of his cheek and on his tongue. It had no…taste. If it had had a taste, Jeff’s heart would have burst out of his chest and he would have fallen dead to the floor.
After a few moments, it stopped trying to shove itself into his mouth, either couldn’t fit the rest inside or changed its mind. It backed out, climbed his lip and stuck its head up into his left nostril. It shoved in farther, but then withdrew after a few moments and Jeff felt the blood from his nosebleed on its feet as it crawled up onto the top of his nose and sat there, its antenna twitching, looking at him.
Looking at it cross-eyed, there were two roaches instead of only one.
Tears flowed in buckets down Jeff’s cheeks. Inside his head, he was screaming, mindlessly hysterical, but he remained rigid, standing in the middle of a private dining room in a five-star restaurant with a gun in his mouth and a cockroach on his nose.
Whitworth reached over and put out his index finger, the way you’d extend a finger to a parakeet, and the bug crawled off Jeff’s nose and onto the finger. Whitworth held the bug up to his own face, puckered his lips and made kissing noises. The bug moved forward and pecked its head at his lips. Then the roach turned on his finger, ran down his hand, arm and body and out onto the floor and began to skitter back toward the table it’d crawled up on. Just as it got to the tablecloth, Chapman Whitworth lifted his foot and slammed it down, crushing the bug into the carpet. He rubbed his shoe back and forth, like he was grinding out a cigarette butt, and when he lifted it, there was nothing left but a brown-yellow smear of goo.
“Hate roaches,” he said casually. “Filthy creatures.”
He focused his attention on Jeff.
“So what am I going to do with you, my stupid friend?” He sighed. “Certainly can’t have you blowing your brains out all over the carpet—there’ll probably be an extra charge for the bug stain already and I am on a tight budget, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Don’t have money in my ‘underdog, grassroots’ campaign to throw around on unnecessary expenses.”
He held out his hand. “Give me that.” The gun popped out of Jeff’s mouth so fast the sight on the top of the barrel chipped off a small piece of his front tooth, and flew across the space between them into Whitworth’s hand. Jeff discovered he’d been set free, was once again in control of his own body. He reached up and scrubbed his face with his hands to get the feel of stickery feet off his skin, smearing the blood and the tears. He dug at his itching eye, unable to keep himself from scratching it further.
“I suppose I could throw you out the window.”
Jeff’s body lifted a few inches off the floor and then dropped back down.
“But the noise…and the broken glass, and it might be possible to survive a fall from a fourth-floor window—every bone in your body broken, but alive. If the fall killed you, it certainly would seem a plausible end to your miserable life. You throw yourself to your death like the fat waitress you wined and dined did from your balcony.”
Jeff picked up his two-hundred-dollar tie and used it to wipe the blood, snot and tears off his face. He’d already figured out that all the speculation was for his benefit. Chapman Whitworth knew exactly what he planned to do with him and was only toying with him by ticking off the list of possible outcomes.
“Just do it,” Jeff said, surprised that his voice was level. “Quit playing games and just do it.”
The black cloud sprang up behind Chapman Whitworth in a nanosecond. It towered all the way to the arched ceiling, and there were flames licking off it. The creature smelled, too, this close up. A stink of rot and decay and burning flesh. And sulphur.
Jeff had never before felt the kind of elemental, raw terror that gripped him then. A special-effects movie monster that was real. Real! He could feel the hatred and anger pulsing off the creature in waves of loathing. Jeff’s knees buckled out from under him and he collapsed to the floor, where he curled up in a fetal position, his knees under him, his arms across his head, his eyes squeezed tight shut.
“Please…” He felt the sniveling whine whisper out his lips but would have sworn it was so soft no one could hear.
“Please?” the roaring voice mocked. “Please!” it shouted and the sound tore holes in Jeff’s head and he knew he would die from the blows.
Then Jeff’s prostrate form began to rise off the floor, higher and higher until he felt his head bump the ceiling. He had watched his own ascent in stunned horror, but now he shut his eyes, cringing away from what he knew was coming. His body didn’t just fall. It was hurled down like a child throwing a rag doll on the sidewalk.
And everything went black.