You were real scared, weren’t you?
Ariel heard the voice from a long way off.
I know how that feels, being so scared you’re afraid you’re going to throw up. I felt like that once.
It was the voice of the little girl from the woods.
But you’re okay now. You won’t ever be alone, locked inside with…you won’t ever have to do that again. I promise.
Part of Ariel wanted to sink back into darkness, but another part struggled to return to the world. She had a huge fishbowl full of goldfish in her room at home. She’d watch the fish swimming and the turtles crawling around on the rocks on the bottom. Then a bubble would come out from under a rock, a tiny circle of air, and she would watch it float upward, up and up until it burst out into the air of the surface.
Ariel was a bubble. She felt herself begin to rise from the bottom toward the light.
She had hidden far down inside herself when the monster had screamed at her and they ran away into the woods. She hadn’t come back up when she fell, just watched it from the dark depths, accepted that she was going to die with her eyes turned up to the sky while the creature roared in filthy hatred and rage.
And then the light had come.
It was there above her, a light so bright it shone in through her eyes and all the way down into the depths of her where she had hidden. It lit everything with a warm, shadowless radiance.
Ariel crept out of hiding. She could hear and feel the creature in her, terrified, trying to get her body to move and carry it away, but Ariel’s body could not obey. It was spent.
The monster roared, screamed obscenities, thundered in terror and rage, banging around. She crept through the hallways of darkness inside herself. It had been achingly cold before, the touch of every surface the feel of a rock in the snow. The stench of the creature, the fetid reek of excrement, from some animal too horrible to imagine filled every breath.
It wasn’t cold now, though. There was a warm breeze sweeping through the hallways, carrying with it the sweet scent of roses and honeysuckle and Ariel found herself running toward the glow she could see far off. She had hidden so deep, it was a long way. But the closer she got, the warmer and brighter it got.
Suddenly, the creature was there, all around, everywhere. The cold of it bit into her bones, the stink so vile and thick you could almost touch it. Ariel dropped to her knees and covered her head. She could feel the creature’s terror, feel it struggling.
She realized it was paying no attention to her, so Ariel tried again to do what she had done before. She focused all her will on taking her body back—only for a moment, an instant long enough to cry out. But instead of turning on her in fury when she did, the creature faltered. Some great force from outside her was applying pressure on the monster, and Ariel felt the creature’s grip begin to loosen. That gave her such a surge of wild hope and joy that she shoved at it with all the will she had, every ounce of her strength. It squalled out a great, awful, guttural cry with her voice, so loud it made her throat hurt.
Then it was gone.
Quiet.
Nothing.
She lifted her head slowly, and when she did, everything snapped back. She was no longer looking out big screens that showed the world she couldn’t get to or touch. She was just…looking. She blinked. Again, slowly closing her eyes and opening them just as slowly. Her eyelids did as she told them.
She realized then that even the stink of him was gone.
A little girl with curly brown hair and deep dimples was leaning over her, her lips moving, and as if stoppers had been pulled from her ears, Ariel heard the voice.
“Ariel, come back,” the little girl said. “It’s gone now.”
Behind the little girl stood a beautiful woman with long blond hair, clothed in a gown of sparkling diamonds. They shimmered, each giving off its own light, hundreds of thousands of points of brilliance made of stones that refracted all the lights of the spectrum she’d seen on display in science class at school. Only hundreds of times brighter and more beautiful.
She heard the woman tell the little girl to go for help, that she’d stay here with Ariel.
“But how can I find the way in the dark without a light?”
“The way is lit for you,” the woman said.
Ariel saw sparkles of light, like a trail of multicolored glitter, appear all around the woman. Then it moved toward the woods, like a tail following a kite, and wound its way through the trees. The little girl followed it and was gone.
“Ariel.” The woman called her name. “It’s safe now. I’m here and I won’t let anything harm you.”
Ariel stared at the beauty of the brilliant light. She was so tired, but so peaceful. She could go to sleep now. The nightmare couldn’t get her anymore.
There was a man, then, a big black man who held her hand, spoke softly to her and wrapped her in his warm T-shirt. She’d looked at him, then closed her eyes—not yet ready to return to the world. It was dark after that, but not cold dark. Just no-light dark. That was when she became the bubble and started toward the surface. She could feel the bubble of her consciousness continue to rise now. Higher and higher until she burst out into the air. She opened her eyes. Then closed them again, and the terror she knew so well grabbed hold of her heart and squeezed. She’d only caught a glimpse of the thing that sat at the foot of her bed, but a glimpse was all she needed. Cassidy Davenport—but not now.
With her heart pounding, she carefully peeked out a forest of eyelashes. Nothing she saw made sense; then reason settled around her and she understood she was in a hospital. Her leg! She remembered then, the sickening snapping sound she’d heard when she landed at the bottom of the cliff. She could see her leg now, wrapped round and round like a big club, suspended by a sling in the air behind the head of the thing that had taken over the body of Cassidy Davenport crouched on the foot of the bed.
Ariel lay perfectly still. Watched. Listened.
The thing had come to kill her with the scalpel clutched in its bloody hand. It meant to kill the little girl, too, the one who had found Ariel in the woods. The kind man who’d wrapped his warm shirt around her wanted to stop the thing, but it would move too quickly. Ariel knew about such things. He wouldn’t get to it before it plunged the blade into the little girl’s back and then into Ariel’s chest.
Ariel couldn’t run away and hide from it. She couldn’t move at all with her leg hanging up there…like a club.
Jeff shook his head and opened his eyes wider as if that would somehow admit some light from the lightless room. He hadn’t slept in—how long? He couldn’t even remember anymore. Didn’t matter. He wouldn’t nod off now, didn’t intend to spend the last hours of his life asleep! Besides, he didn’t feel sleepy. A little loopy, maybe…no, actually a lot loopy—spinning.
He was turning slowly, suspended by a single crystal strand above a darkness that was somehow darker than where he lay now. It was a darkness that collected and pooled in its depths, a darkness that was more than merely the absence of light. The darkness itself was a thing, an entity. A malevolent being with shiny teeth you couldn’t see and great crushing jaws invisible now, but Jeff would feel them both when the strand broke and he fell into the nothingness.
His mind kept hopping from one random thought to another. They slid across the expanse of his consciousness like sailboats on a glassy pond and they moved so fast he couldn’t catch any one of them long enough to think it.
“Got any idea what’s up with the beheading?” he thought the words as he spoke them. No, he spoke them several seconds before he thought them. He said something else, too, that had the word messy in it. Daniel didn’t reply, but Jeff could hear him scooting slowly across the floor toward the bucket in the corner.
Jeff was afraid, but he couldn’t even catch that to feel the emotion. It scampered away out of reach.
Would it hurt?
No. He’d read that somewhere—about Anne Boleyn, he thought, how she’d begged not to have her head lopped off with an ax on a chopping block, that she’d feared that ever since she was a little girl. So they’d arranged to bring in someone—from France, he remembered. Why did he remember that?—who would use a sword instead of an ax. She was saying her final prayers and he came up behind her, sliced her head off so instantly that as it rolled across the floor, her lips were still moving in prayer.
“You won’t feel anything,” he said. It was hard to talk with his nose smashed. “It’s actually a pretty humane way to kill someone, if you think about it. There’s no pain. You just—”
“Shut up!” The words exploded out of the nearby darkness. “Just. Shut. Up. You owe me that much—the privilege of not having to hear your voice.”
Daniel said other things, too, about Jeff playing the big shot. The ferocity of the words was stunning. The level of loathing and hatred contained in them staggering.
And for the first time since the moment he’d set his sights on Emily Burke, Jeff Kendrick paused to consider Daniel. What did he feel? What would it feel like for the woman you loved, your wife, the mother of your child, to betray you? Because that was what she’d done. You could put all the pretty words on it you wanted to—call it an affair, a fling, a flirtation, a romance—but the bottom line was that the fair Emily Marie Burke had decided to break the promise to remain faithful forever that she’d made to Daniel Burke fourteen years ago. She had made a decision to betray him.
Jeff had never considered Emily in that light before.
He’d never considered the consequences—the fallout—from his decision to take her.
But he’d loved her. He had!
So had Daniel Burke. And Daniel had seen her first.
At first, Jack thought he was imagining it. But he’d spent too many years training his senses to collect information for that. He really was seeing it. Movement. Slow, gradual. But movement. Ariel Murphy’s leg was moving back away from the monster crouched on the foot of the bed. Inching back, farther and farther. Millimetering back.
It took less than a heartbeat for Jack to record that information. Another heartbeat to figure out…to grasp what was happening, what must be happening.
Andi was staring up at the flickering television, the image of her father and the other man still shown as words continued to flow across the bottom of the screen. She was crying, “Daddy, Daddy!”
The monster behind her was giggling in glee, almost dancing.
“Now!” he called out.
The monster immediately turned to him, lifting the blade as it did to plunge it into Andi’s back.
Ariel let go and her ice-pack-encased leg hit the creature in the back of the head. It wasn’t a hard blow. Ariel was incapable of putting any force behind it. But the blow was enough to knock the creature off balance for a second, and a second was all Jack needed.
Then came rogue time—the suspension of reality as the world saw it, where everything cranked down into slow motion and words were dragged out in loooong syllables. Or it sped up in a dizzying fast-forward that turned voices into the chipmunks from the annual Christmas special.
It was slow now. Jack reached back. He always left his shirt untucked to cover the weapon. But he must have stuffed it down inside his pants behind the gun as he crossed the hallway to Ariel’s room. He didn’t remember doing it. Instinct.
In a loping slow-motion movement, he pulled the gun free and raised it. The monster on the bed was knocked sideways in equal slow motion, lost its balance and began to tumble toward the edge of the bed. It twisted as it fell, lifting the blade to stab it down into the lump under the sheet that was Ariel Murphy.
Jack was a crack shot, the firearms instructor for his department, and the target was less than ten feet away. Still, it was a gamble—but a risk he had to take. He wasn’t shooting a killer. She was only a little girl.
Ignoring the deadly-fire protocol that required him to “aim for the largest target,” he took less than a second to draw a bead and then squeezed the trigger. The report of the gunshot sounded like a cannon in the confined space. The sound released time and it snapped back, a rubber band pulled taut and released. Blood squirted out of the skinny thigh of the monster and the scalpel flew from its grasp. It jerked backward, hit the bed, then crumpled to the floor with a sickening thud.
Someone was shrieking.
It was Andi. She had turned halfway at the sound of the gunshot, saw her uncle Jack with a pistol in both hands, the monster on the floor in a puddle of blood and her father’s image on the screen, kneeling in front of the hooded man who was going to chop off his head—and she snapped, went completely hysterical, screaming and banging her fists on the footboard of the bed.
After that, everything happened at once. Jack stood with his gun pointed at the floor as the room suddenly filled with people. First nurses, doctors and orderlies, then Crock and the sheriff. The wounded little girl on the floor wasn’t behaving like a severely injured child. She was a wild animal—kicking and screaming. It took three nurses and a burly orderly to subdue Cassidy, and it would have taken considerably more if loss of blood hadn’t weakened her. She writhed until the contents of a syringe buried in her arm turned her into a limp rag doll. Crock took in the whole scene in one glance.
“Ariel’s awake,” Jack told him. It was hard to get the words out in the wake of the adrenaline rush that had sent his body into pulsing action. Jack stepped to the small child under the sheet and spoke her name softly. Ariel’s eyes popped open and she stared at him in terror. The fear dissipated and the suggestion of a smile briefly lit her face.
“You did good, sweetheart,” he told her. “Real good.”
Then he turned to the sheriff. “You’ll want this,” he said and offered his weapon, handgrip first.
“Eventually, yeah,” the sheriff said. “Not now. Keep it. You might need it.”
Jack shoved the gun back into the waistband of his sweatpants and pulled his shirt out over it.
Then he went to the hysterical child at the foot of the bed. He tried to put his arms around Andi. She fought him off, shaking her head, beating on his chest with little fists, crying and wailing. He took hold of her in a bear hug from behind, letting her scream and kick and hit, expending her terror and sorrow. Eventually, she began to relax.
Activity went on around them, but they were an island. Andi and Jack. As soon as she stopped struggling, he lifted the crying child into his arms and carried her out of the room, past the pandemonium in the hallway to the stairway door. He shoved it open, stepped inside and sat down with Andi cradled in his lap on the steps leading up to the next floor. He rocked her back and forth as she sobbed, wiped her hair out of her face, hummed some nameless tune and felt the warmth of her body against his chest. Eventually, she stopped trembling. When she had wound down to hiccuping breaths, she drew back out of his arms and looked up at him.
Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face slathered with tears, her nose running. She was absolutely beautiful.
“They’re g-g-going to cho—”
“No, sweetheart, nobody’s going to hurt your daddy.”
“How can you stop them? You don’t even know where he is.”
The last word went up in volume and tears threatened to return.
“Cut off the head of a snake, the rest of it dies.” He gestured with his chin toward Ariel’s room. “She knows where to find the snake.”
In absolute darkness, it was impossible for Daniel to judge the passage of time. Had Billy Ray been gone an hour? Five? Ten minutes? Daniel had tried counting slowly, but gave up the effort because he couldn’t focus on it. He’d get to twenty-nine and go blank, didn’t know if the next number was thirty or forty or fifty. Besides, what was the point? He couldn’t count off every second of every minute until the end. And knowing how many were left, how many breaths, how many heartbeats—why would he want to know?
“Would you mind not doing that?”
The voice out of the nearby darkness startled Daniel. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about Jeff’s presence, but he was no longer acutely aware of it, either. The rage had drained away after—how long? No way to tell. When the emotion had begun to fade, Daniel had clung to it, seized it with both hands and clenched his fists. But he couldn’t hold onto that level of rage, couldn’t maintain the intensity. The energy of the bright hot emotion was replaced by dull anger and loathing that ached like a rotten tooth.
“Doing what?”
“Tapping your foot.”
“I’m not tapping my foot.”
“Yes, you are. I’ve been listening to it for the past fifteen minutes.”
“How do you know it’s been fifteen minutes?”
“I’ve been counting the seconds.”
The shared humanity of that—of counting—hit Daniel hard. Jeff was going to die, too, after all. They both had a finite number of seconds left.
“I guess I was tapping my foot to…stay in the world. The sensory deprivation…I needed something…”
“I think my right index finger is broken. I’ve been concentrating on the throbbing in it, willing myself to feel it, holding onto the pain. I even…squeezed it to make it hurt worse. Same reason, I guess.”
Daniel said nothing else and the silence flowed in a wave back into the small space. But Daniel was aware of Jeff now, could almost feel him only a few feet away—the warmth of his body, maybe. Or smell him. The sweat. Fear sweat.
“How did you get here?” Daniel didn’t decide to speak, merely heard himself say the words, maybe from the same reflex that had set his foot tapping. The silence was as oppressive as the dark.
“I rode here on a bug’s back,” Jeff said, with the lazy, sardonic ease that always yanked a knot of instant animosity in Daniel’s belly. It did this time, too, but the blinding rage didn’t return with it. “A cockroach. Several, actually.”
Jeff told Daniel about the bugs without embellishment, and the story of how he’d lost it and had gone after Chapman Whitworth in a rueful tone without rationalization or self-justification. Daniel listened in growing horror. The thought of being covered in crawling bugs—
In the cave, when they were kids, Daniel had only looked back once, and from that moment on his skin had crawled in revulsion and horror. What Comes Behind. The sea of spiders and slithering snakes out there in the dark beyond the light. And the big one he never saw until it was too late.
“Daniel?” Jeff’s voice pierced the profound dark.
“What?”
“You made a sound, a cry.”
“I’ve…met some of his ‘bugs.’” Daniel didn’t elaborate and Jeff asked for no explanation.
The silence returned.
Then Daniel heard his own voice again, speaking his thoughts out into the darkness. “The efreet put a black widow spider into the cuff of my pants in the cave and I carried it home with me. It crawled out when my parents were away and I was babysitting my little sister.”
The memory of her precious face, jade green eyes sparkling, filled his mind so bright it drove the darkness into the corners.
“She held it out to me, said it tickled her palm.” He paused and his voice was as thin and fragile as tissue paper. “‘Look it, Dan-Dan.’ That’s what she called me. ‘Look I find.’”
“How old was she?”
“Three.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve.” Daniel didn’t will his voice to continue speaking, but it went on without him. “The spider turned toward me, looked at me before it bit her.” He’d never told that part to anybody. Not Jack. Not Theresa. Not Becca. No one. It had been his private agony.
“I tried to get help. I picked her up and carried her, ran as fast as…Marianne died in my arms.”
Daniel heard a groan from the darkness. Jeff’s voice was husky. “I’m sorry, Daniel,” he said. And maybe he was.