Daniel was trying to concentrate, but the dark and silence made it hard. It was as if the pressure of the world and light and people and sound was the force that kept all the thoughts and intentions inside his head. And when that force was taken away, the contents of his mind leaked out into the nothingness and evaporated—disappeared like the smoke from a dying campfire.
He needed to make an accounting of himself. That was what you did, right? You were minutes—how many?—away from coming face-to-face with God, so you took some kind of moral inventory. Saw where you stood.
Oh, Daniel had proclaimed from the pulpit for years that there existed no celestial scorecard where more yes votes than no votes would get you in. Heaven was a gift—one you didn’t and couldn’t earn.
And all that sounded profound and pious—if you said it with an appropriately weighty level of humility and gratitude. It was particularly engaging if you added a little hitch in your voice to indicate that perhaps—just perhaps—you were fighting back tears.
When the image-magnification screen blew your face up twenty feet tall and cameras fed the image live into the homes of hundreds of thousands of people, believability was measured in millimeters, in knowing exactly how far to duck your chin when you prayed so the overhead lights wouldn’t drape the shadow of your nose down your lip in a black smudge that looked like a cleft pallet scar.
But all those years of sermons didn’t mean squat now! It didn’t matter what he’d said. What he had to figure out now, at the end, was what he really believed. Good, evil, heaven, hell, God, Satan. Those were not metaphysical terms—not anymore. They were walking-around-in-an-ordinary-world reality. He knew. He’d seen.
What about the rest of it, though? Not the belief system he kept tucked in his wallet like a Triple A card to rescue him when he got in trouble—fire insurance, some people called it. What was real? What was true?
True.
The word seemed to float like a brightly lit movie title on a marquis in the darkness in front of him. Then it began to blink, a Joe’s Beer Joint sign, on and off, on and off, faster and faster. He shook his head violently to clear his vision and the motion flung apart the thoughts he’d been so carefully cobbling together.
What scuttled in behind them to fill the darkness of his mind was absolute chaos. Unmitigated confusion. The roaring turmoil of an earthquake, the grinding rumble of rocks, dirt and boulders dropping away, crumbling and falling into a bottomless pit of utter darkness.
Then Theresa spoke in his head—the words she’d said that day she’d come to Andi’s hospital room and called Daniel a phony. She sounded like a voice-over in a catastrophe movie now, with the tumult rumbling so loud behind her he had to strain to hear.
“You done traded in real faith for ‘religion’ from the Dollar General Store—the kind that don’t cost nothing and ain’t worth nothin’. You’s just skatin’ around on the shiny outside of believing, gliding along barely even touching the surface.”
He’d been offended, of course.
And she’d been right, of course.
The maelstrom roared on, its rumble an avalanche in his head. The whole world was coming apart, imploding. Mountains fell in on themselves, their jagged peaks hurling toward the earth like serrated swords, impaling the world on their spikes. Gigantic cracks formed in the ground and raced out across it, the split in a melon rushing out ahead of the knife, tearing the world asunder with great ripping, straining sounds.
Andi’s face burst into his mind, shining like a thousand suns. It lit the great darkness of the empty pit eating the world. The rumbling and roaring ceased; land masses stopped moving. Chaos shrank away from her brilliance, cowering small and terrified before the splendor of it. At that moment, Daniel’s confusion didn’t matter, his questions didn’t matter, his belief system didn’t matter. Having his head chopped off didn’t matter.
All that mattered was Andi!
Where was she?
Who was taking care of her?
Was she alone?
Was she safe?
Was she hurt?
Was she frightened?
Was she calling for her daddy?
He loved that child. Loving that little girl was the purest, best, most holy thing Daniel Burke had ever done!
He paused, stopped breathing.
That was it, then, wasn’t it.
Love.
As you sucked in your final breath at the end of all things, love was what mattered. It was all that mattered.
Love was true.
Love was good, too, the force that stood against the evil Daniel had not wanted to know existed. The evil he’d caught glimpses of—in the eyes of the madman who’d butchered Emily, and distorting the innocent features of a little girl who looked like a life-sized Raggedy Ann doll.
If good really existed, were true, all the rest of it was true, too—all the things he’d said Sunday after Sunday about good versus evil and light against darkness. And about love that was pure and good. He hadn’t really believed a single word of it when he’d said it—in feigned faith and counterfeit humility. But his glib insincerity didn’t change reality. It was still true.
What was it Jack had told Jeff—that he’d been struggling to wedge truth into the shape of his personal belief system? That was backwards, of course. What was required of all of them, Jack and Daniel and the others, was to re-form their personal belief systems into the shape of truth.
Silence settled back around Daniel then, gentle, a warm blanket on a cold night. There was just one more thing now, here at the end—the matter of Jeff Kendrick to attend to before it was all over.
It took Jack a few moments to absorb the enormity of Theresa’s words. She and Becca weren’t coming. So it wasn’t going to go down the way Jack had designed it in his head. As soon as pieces of memory about the beast began to form in their minds, they’d all understood they were going to have to complete the job they’d started years ago. It had been a given who the cast of characters would be. The three musketeers would take up where they’d left off in 1985—wherever that was. He, Daniel and Becca would finish the task they’d begun when they were twelve years old.
And this time, they wouldn’t be all on their own. This time, Theresa Washington, a spiritual leviathan, would lead the charge.
Then his plan began to fall apart. Daniel’d been kidnapped. And now Theresa was saying she and Becca wouldn’t be on the expedition, either. The enormity of it rammed a boot into his belly. He—Jack Carpenter—would be in charge.
He and Crock would have to do it on their own—because Andi was not setting foot in that cave. That point was absolutely nonnegotiable.
“Andi’s not going,” he said firmly.
Theresa didn’t argue with him, just asked, “How you figure to do it without her?”
“We’ll have to come up with something because Andi’s not going anywhere near that cave.”
“Don’t you think maybe you’d ought to ask her how she feels ’bout that?”
“It doesn’t matter how she feels about it. For crying out loud, Theresa, she’s ten years old. She’s not old enough to make a decision like that.”
“That child’s a whole lot older than ten and you know it, Jack.”
“I’m scared, Uncle Jack,” Andi said. He turned from the image of Theresa on the screen to the little girl leaned over the front seat from the back. The child’s face was white. All the blood had drained out of it and she was so pale her lips almost looked blue. He reached over and patted her arm.
“Of course you’re scared, sweetheart. But you’ll be safe here—I’ll see if you can stay with the sheriff for a little while. You liked him and he has a little girl about your age.”
“No, it’s not safe here,” she said.
“Why, sure it is. The sheriff has a gun almost as big as mine and—”
“It’s not safe anywhere,” she said. Theresa was right. She wasn’t ten years old.
“When Mr. Bishop came into Miss Lunde’s classroom that day, I was in the storage closet, sharpening my pencil. So I just closed the door and the man with the demon made out of flies didn’t know I was there.”
The non sequitur was jarring.
“That man, the one who killed Mommy, do you know what he said?”
“No, what did he say?”
“He told her he didn’t want two hostages. Either she had to die or I did, and she told him that he didn’t have a decision to make, that he’d have to kill her to get to me. She told me to run and hide and I hid where he’d never find me.” She paused for a beat, then whispered, “I heard the gunshot, though.”
Andi was quiet then, a thousand-mile stare in her eyes, looking at nothing, or maybe at something they couldn’t see, out the front window.
“Why did you tell me that story, honey?” As he said it, Jack felt a hole begin to open up in front of him. He was standing on the edge, the ground crumbling beneath his feet.
She didn’t respond, like she hadn’t heard him.
“Andi…why—?”
She turned to look at him; then she shook her head and turned back to stare out the window. “I don’t know”—her voice began to tremble—“except…I just…I can’t hide anymore, Uncle Jack, while people I love die.” The ground let go and Jack was tumbling down into nothing. It was dark there and the hole had no bottom.
Andi’s voice broke altogether and she began to cry, had to choke out the rest. “I don’t want my daddy to die while I hide.” Then she put her head in her hands and sobbed.
Jack looked past her at Crock. His face was absolutely blank, devoid of any expression at all. Then he turned back to the face on the phone. Theresa looked like she was about to burst into tears, too, and Jack felt utter helplessness wash over him. He recognized the feeling.
He instantly spotted the red dress, watched it billow around Lyla as she fell.
“This is the way it’s supposed to be,” Theresa whispered. “Ain’t no use trying to be Jonah. Andi pointed that out to me just the other day. Said it was best to go on to Nevanah and get it over with.” There was a heartbeat pause; then Theresa added softly, “Andi was dead, Jack. The heart monitor flatlined. Then you called her name and she come back—she was sent back. You remember what she said?”
Jack remembered, all right.
A little girl with brown curls, cinnamon-sprinkled freckles and dimples had poked her head up out of a sea of stuffed animals on a hospital bed.
“I heard you, Mr. Jack. When you called me, I knew who you were and that you needed me. So I came back.”
Didn’t surprise Theresa that wasn’t nobody happy about the way things had turned out—might even be mad at her about it. But she didn’t have no choice but to deliver the message she’d been give. Oh, God didn’t talk to her out loud. She never had known whether she’d ought to envy or pity the folks he did talk to that way. Granted, it’d be nice to be absolutely, one hundred percent sure you’s doing what you’s supposed to be doin’. There was a lot to be said for that. But there was something so…intimate and personal about hearin’ God’s voice in your head. And wonderin’ if you’s making it all up, listenin’ to your own self and then sayin’ it was God talkin’. That was where the faith part come in, where you had to draw up real close to the Almighty, and she always wondered if the people God talked to out loud ever had to do that part.
Of course, the chief thing Theresa Washington had to do to find out what God was telling her was to shut up her own mouth and listen. Soon’s she did this time, she knew how he intended things to be. Jack and Crock and Andi was supposed to face down that demon. She and Becca’d been give another task.
Come to think of it, it would be better to hear God talking out loud—so when he told you to do something, you could ask him how.
Becca spoke to Theresa and she turned the screen so everybody down in Bradford’s Ridge could see what she was sayin’, too.
“You don’t understand,” Becca said. “I have to go. It’s my fault he’s back.”
“Your fault—why would you think that?” Jack asked.
Becca’s voice got so quiet Theresa hoped the folks on the phone could hear it.
“I remembered,” she said.
“The efreet? When we…defeated it, made it go away—whatever? You remember that part?” Jack was incredulous.
“Uh-huh. And big pieces of the rest of the summer, too. The memories started coming back as soon as I found that note where Bishop wrote down what had to be done. It’s what we did, what the Cat in the Hat told me to do. But I…failed.”
“The Cat in the Hat?” Crock was confused.
“Like Princess Buttercup,” Andi said, and it struck Theresa how ridiculous they sounded.
“How did you fail?” Jack asked.
“I—”
“It don’t matter ’cause what happened to her ain’t gone be what happens to you,” Theresa said. “That ole demon can appear any way he wants to. He won’t come at you the way he come at Becca.”
“I still want to know,” Jack said.
Becca wouldn’t look at Jack’s face on the screen. Or at Theresa. She studied her hands in her lap. “When I was a little girl, my father…did things. Made me do things, awful things. The efreet knew all about it, every sick, disgusting detail. He said I wanted it, I asked for it, I liked it.” She took a deep, shuddery breath.
“Becca, you never said.” Jack’s voice was pained and tender.
“I didn’t tell anybody. Back then, nobody would have believed me, and if I’d ever breathed a word, Daddy would have killed me. It was an ugly, festering secret. And when that monster knew, and described it. One incident after another—every tiny detail, the way the dust motes floated in a beam of sunlight that time in the barn when…”
She looked up then, her face a mask of revulsion. “I didn’t just remember those times, I relived them. It’s like I…fell down in a crack of time and every horrible thing he ever did to me—starting when I was four years old—was happening to me all over again. I lived those times again, one after the other, right there in that cave.”
Theresa reached out and put her arm around Becca. The girl’s whole body was vibrating.
“And something inside me…shattered. I could almost hear the sound of it—a wineglass on a stone floor. Pieces of it, tiny sharp shards of me, flew in all directions. I fell to my knees and I think Jack crawled over to me.” She looked at Jack. “You didn’t come in with Daniel and me. You were already there. The Bad Kids brought you. Do you remember?”
Jack shook his head. “I still can’t…I don’t remember any of it.”
“Daniel was standing beside me. I bowed my head, couldn’t look up because the demon had won. He had beaten me and he had to know it.”
“Not necessarily,” Theresa said, but Becca continued as if she hadn’t heard her.
“I only remember bits and pieces of what happened after that—not because the memories are gone, but because I was gone. I had…some kind of mental breakdown. They use other words now. The clinical diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia. That’s when the psychosis started—that day, what I experienced in the cave. Hallucinations and voices…I don’t guess I have to tell you that I’m still not ‘right.’ Probably never will be.”
Theresa patted her shoulder reassuringly and Becca gave her an odd look, then turned back to Jack.
“So you don’t remember what the efreet said to you?”
Jack shook his head.
“I think he must have—” she darted a glance at Theresa “—become Isaac to you.”
Theresa’s whole body went cold at the mention of her son’s name.
“I only saw a monster, but I think you saw Isaac, and Isaac accused you, said what had happened to him was your fault, that he got killed because of you.”
Theresa’s heart hammered in her chest, thoughts and emotions crashing into her like the waves on rocks. Isaac was dead. Dead. Oh, she knew. A boy don’t just vanish into thin air and not make a peep for twenty-six years unless he was…But still, in her mother’s heart, there had always been a little flame of hope burning, telling her that one day there’d be a big strapping young man standin’ in her doorway and he’d smile and hold out his arms to her and…
Pfffft. The little flame of hope flickered like a candle in the wind and guttered out.
Words tripped over themselves as they tumbled out of her mouth.
“Isaac? How could…what did Jack have to do with…?” She turned to Jack then. His face was a frozen mask of shock. “Jack, what did you do, son?”
Jack’s voice sounded vacant, uninhabited. “I’ve always known it was my fault, but I couldn’t remember what happened until that night at your house—the night the hospital called Daniel about Mikey Rutherford. Daniel and I were asking what you remembered about that summer and you said you’d been a wreck after Isaac disappeared. And suddenly the memory was there, one of those ‘expelled memories,’ and I could see it all like it was a movie playing in my head.”
He stopped and took a deep breath.
“The night Isaac disappeared, Daniel and I went out drinking in the barn at Becca’s, got so drunk we couldn’t ride my bike back home. So I sneaked into her house and called Isaac, asked him to come get us and made him promise he wouldn’t tell anybody. But he never showed up. That’s why it was my fault—if I hadn’t called him, Isaac would have been safe at home in his own bed.”
So that was why Isaac never said where he was going. Well, it was good to know that much at least. Theresa let out the breath she’d been holding, a sad form of relief flooding over her.
“Wasn’t no way you coulda known,” she said. “Somebody had in mind to”—she couldn’t say the word—“take my Isaac, and if it hadn’t a’been then, it’d a been some other time.”
Jack didn’t look into that phone Crock was holding out there in front of him. She barely caught his whisper.
“The night at your house when I remembered, I should have told you then. I started to tell you, but…” Then he did look at her. “I’m so sorry, Theresa.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Wasn’t your fault.”
It was quiet for a moment. Then Crock turned the conversation back to where it’d been before Becca’d mentioned Isaac.
“What else do you remember, Becca—any detail that you might not even think is important?” Theresa could hear the police officer in the question.
“Only flashes, images.” She paused. “When I fell down on the floor, I saw—there was something drawn on the floor of the cave, in chalk, I think. And I remember Jack had been kneeling where the Bad Kids had dropped him, but then he was there beside me. Daniel was standing on the other side—his face was so scared—holding onto that cross he always wore. I think Jack took my hand, and I reached to take Daniel’s. That’s all, really. Just darkness. And then being outside and hearing birds in the trees.”
Crock spoke to Theresa. “That still doesn’t explain what made the demon…go away. Did Jack and Daniel do something? And why did it come back?”
“No, wasn’t Jack and Daniel done it. Only somebody with the knowing can do that. Any person whose soul belongs to God can exorcize a demon that’s possessed another person—ain’t sayin’ it’s easy, but the Catholic Church has been doing it for centuries. But a demon that’s been summoned, one whose whole being ain’t in the spirit world no more but here in this world—only someone who can see the demon as it really is can send it back where it come from. That’s why Bishop was going to go after it.”
“So if we couldn’t banish it, and Becca didn’t banish it—what did happen?” Jack asked.
“I don’t rightly know, but if I’s to guess what happened, I’d say…maybe that demon wasn’t never banished at all. Hearing how it happened…I ’spect that efreet decided its own self to leave.”
“Why would it do that?” Becca asked.
“Demon can’t read your mind, sugar. Only God can do that. You may have been a mess in your own heart and mind, but that demon didn’t know that. You just sunk down on your knees—right? Didn’t say nothing? That efreet musta thought you was about to come right back at him. He’d thrown the worst he had at you, and far as he could tell, it hadn’t stopped you. And…seeing all three of you side by side in front of him…”
She turned to Becca. “You said you was about to take Jack’s and Daniel’s hands, right? There’s something about that, I think, some power in that kind of connection.” She thought for a moment. “Yep, I think that’s it. I think that efreet decided he’d ought to pick up his marbles and go home, live to fight again another day.”
“Why did he wait so long to come back, all these years?” Jack asked.
“Shoot, Jack, it wasn’t no long time to that demon! They’s eternal creatures—a few years, why, probably seemed to him like he just went out to Starbucks for a latte.”
“And first thing he did when he came back was send his troops out looking for Becca so he could keep her from finishing what she started,” Jack said. He paused, thoughtful. “He screwed up the first time, didn’t see three little kids as a threat, and he didn’t intend to be surprised again.”
Theresa remembered how Bishop’d sounded the day he’d told her gettin’ rid of the efreet would take everything there was in him.
“That demon will do anything to distract you from what you’s there to do,” Theresa said. “That beast will bewilder and confound you, keep you tied in knots—upset, scared, confused—so you won’t have no strength to use against him.”
Bishop had said the monster would prey on ugly emotions—rage, jealousy, guilt—that he could sniff ’em out like a hound dog.
“He’ll use the worst things in your lives—all the ugly—to take you out, break you, make you back down and run away,” Theresa said. “You can’t be no dirty ole sewer pipe with scared and guilt and hate jammed in there so tight can’t nothing good get through.”
When she turned her attention to Crock, her face and voice were tender. “I don’t know what you done in your life, Major Crocker, but I ’spect you ain’t pure as the driven snow—none of us is. You best make your peace with God ’bout whatever’s blackening your soul ’fore you go in there.”
Andi spoke then, for the first time. “Miss Theresa, you said that God didn’t intend for you to fight the efreet—that he had another job for you. What job?”
“Me and Becca—we got to stop them people of Chapman Whitworth’s, the ones that’s plannin’ the Big Bad Thing. God don’t give you a warning ’bout somethin’ as a kind of heads-up so you don’t miss the story on the eleven o’clock news. If he tells you in advance, he means for you to do something about it.”
“What are you going to do?” Andi asked.
“Why, I don’t have no idea.”