As Becca headed east along the Ohio River, Theresa spotted a smudge of smoke in the sky ahead. Whatever was burning was something big to be producing that much smoke.
But it was funny-looking smoke.
“Do you see that?” Becca asked. “Or is it just me?”
“That smoke, you mean?”
“It’s not smoke.”
And it wasn’t smoke, couldn’t be, didn’t act like smoke. Smoke spewed up from a fire into the sky, going higher and higher. This gray…cloud, fog spread out on the ground.
“If it ain’t smoke, what is it?”
“I don’t know what it is, but I know where it’s coming from.”
“You think he’s…”
“It’s happening because of him and maybe he’s doing it on purpose to hide something. Or maybe when that kind of evil uses all its power—it produces…that, the way boiling water makes steam.”
It was clear to Theresa and Becca, though maybe not to anybody else, that the center of the fog was the Rivergate Hotel. The fog got thicker and darker as they approached it, blotting out the late afternoon sun so completely that automatic street lights came on and cars had to turn on their headlights.
Becca parked where Theresa directed her, in the back lot. They got out and donned their masks and Theresa pulled up her hood so she looked like a red Grim Reaper. It was early, so there was no crowd yet. Still, the lobby held all manner of strange beings, Vikings and clowns and Indian maidens—lots of color, too, with a red M&M, a yellow Minion, a blue Dorie the Fish, a purple dinosaur and a green Alf the Elf.
Theresa led them through a labyrinth of hallways, winding toward the back of the building where the employee lounges, huge industrial kitchens and laundry rooms were located.
Nobody noticed when she snatched one of the rolling laundry hampers, dumped most of the dirty sheets and towels from it into the one beside it and pushed the almost empty one down the hall.
“Pull the car up to the back door on the east side,” Theresa said, “the one beside the dumpsters. I’ll be waiting.”
When Becca appeared out of the fog, the image startled Theresa. Not because the horned mask, the red suit with black batwings and a forked tail was scary. It was disturbing because the outfit was the shape of the figure hidden by the pillar of smoke in the painting of the efreet in Bishop’s office. Whoever it was who’d drawn the first cartoon devil had obviously seen a real one.
The two women stepped between the big green dumpsters and the building, Becca with the bag full of rats and the other garbage bag Theresa’d told her to get. When Becca opened up the “rat bag,” Theresa recoiled so violently she bumped her head on the dumpster. How could she touch one of them creatures? Pick it up? Might even be the one that took that hunk outta her leg, or the one that bit her on the neck. How could—?
“You hold the bag open and I’ll put the rats in,” Becca said, and Theresa knew that skinny little thing would dig every last one of them rats outa that bag so Theresa wouldn’t have to touch ’em.
Becca reached in and pulled out the first one, its head barely affixed to its body. Musta been one of them Biscuit got a’hold of. Biscuit. Pain swelled in Theresa’s heart.
“They’re still…well, not frozen solid, but stiff.” Theresa could hear the revulsion in Becca’s voice. “I don’t know how lifelike they’re going to look.”
“They’ll serve,” Theresa said. “They got to.” Theresa continued to babble, trying to distract Becca from the grisly task.
“When I worked here as a maid, my partner cleanin’ rooms was the prettiest little thing you ever seen, sweet and innocent, only sixteen. Nyree had a face like an angel and a body like…well, not like an angel.”
As Becca pried the frozen rats apart to distribute the dead bodies in the bags, Theresa described how every bellhop with a pulse had had a thing for Nyree—even the ones old enough to be her grandfather. Especially the ones old enough to be her grandfather.
“Them men was always comin’ up with interestin’ things to show Nyree, tryin’ to get her alone somewhere. They didn’t like it much when I’d show up to tag along.”
There was hardly a nook or cranny of the Rivergate Theresa hadn’t seen on them “scenic tours.” Pulleys big as truck tires in the elevator shafts. HVAC ductwork you could drive a Humvee through. She’d “toured” the top floor of the building where the roof retracted for balloon shows. A bellhop had even pointed out the switch in that ’lectronics room behind the ballroom on the ground floor that released the netting for a balloon drop. Theresa’d thought at the time she wasn’t doin’ nothing but protecting a young girl’s virtue, never dreamed she’d ever use any of the stuff she was findin’ out. The Lord worked in mysterious ways.
After Becca divided the rats into two garbage bags, they set the bags over into the laundry basket, covered them with towels and sheets and rolled the basket back into the building.
They continued down a labyrinth of hallways to the lobby and the atrium, now crowded with all manner of strange beings on their way to the ball. The service elevator was located in the big hallway behind the Balloon Ballroom.
“Only the service elevator goes all the way to the top floor above the ceiling. It ain’t out here with the regular elevators. It’s—”
“Hey, you!” snarled a voice from behind them.
They turned to see Darth Vader striding toward them, the glowing light saber in his hand raised high.
“What do you think you’re doing with a laundry basket out here among the guests?”
Theresa turned toward him. “It ain’t laundry in this here basket,” she said. “It’s dead rats. Couldn’t very well haul dead rats through the lobby right out in front of everybody, now could we?”
Ohio River coal barges didn’t keep to tight schedules, so it was impossible for Sebastian to find out exactly when one would pass the Rivergate tonight—only that sometime between six o’clock and ten o’clock at least one barge, and probably more than one, would glide silently by. He had a spotter upstream who had targeted a barge about half an hour away and another about twenty minutes behind that one. He’d use the first.
Though the fog had grown so thick Sebastian could have launched an aircraft carrier out into the river unseen, he waited until the barge was still a few minutes out, then pushed the dinghy into the inlet and pulled out into the river—not into the shipping channel.
If the barges had been empty, they’d have been floating so high in the water that the tugboat’s radar would pass right over something as small as a dinghy out front. But the barges were fully loaded, sunk ten feet deep, so anything at all beyond the lead barge would show up as a blip on the tug’s screen.
Watching a barge come around a bend in the river was like watching lead screw slowly out of a pencil. But in this fog, it would be impossible to see the front barge coming. You wouldn’t be able to hear it, either. For all their size and girth, Ohio River coal barges traveled almost silently. The rumble of the tug pushing them was more than four football fields behind the front barge.
Sebastian killed the dinghy’s outboard motor and put his hand down into the water. He felt it instantly—the vibration of the tug’s engines. Sound didn’t carry, but the vibration in the water did. The barge was close.
A minute, two maybe, and then it was there in front of him, slicing silently through the water. He waited. Watched the first barge in the tow pass and then the second. He began to ease out into the shipping channel then, turned and matched his speed to the speed of the tug as he pulled up close to the third barge. Though the spotlight on the tug was nothing but a bright blur in the distance now, if the fog should suddenly lift, that searchlight would sweep back and forth over the lead barge and out into the water in front of it. But the light was mounted on the roof of the tug, so it would pass over the tops of the nearest barges.
He pulled alongside a barge that was so heavily loaded that the waterline came within two feet of the narrow walkway that surrounded the cargo area. He slid closer to it until he spotted a cleat, then nudged the dinghy up to the barge there, grabbed the cleat and secured a line around it. He stood and carefully lifted the Javelin up onto the walkway before he hopped out behind it.
Though there was a crew of nine men on the tugboat, on rigid six-hours-on, six-hours-off schedules, their duties mostly involved the tug itself rather than the barges—which were nothing more than floating boxes with no moving parts. Two deckhands, one on each side, would make a circuit of the whole tow sometime during their six-hour watch. Maybe they’d already made their circuit. If they hadn’t, there’d certainly be no reason to send anybody out in the fog to inspect barges they couldn’t see. Sebastian wanted to get on and off the barge without anybody knowing he’d ever been there. That was ideal. He’d rather not have to silence some wandering deckhand who happened to stumble over him—but he would if he had to.
Sebastian slipped the strap on the launcher over his shoulder and stepped over the three-foot-tall edge of the coal compartment and into the coal in neat stacks about thirty feet tall. Ten feet of the stacked coal was below the waterline, which left twenty-foot piles sticking out above. Sebastian made his way toward the center of the barge and selected a spot between two piles of coal. He’d be impossible to see there in the dark even with good visibility.
He knelt, rested the missile launcher on his right shoulder and lowered his face to the sight, an integrated day/night sight that provided such good visibility even in bad weather conditions that it was often used by itself for battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance. The shoreline instantly popped into view and he could make out bushes, trees and rocks. Excellent. He didn’t need such a powerful sight for his purposes, though. You could see the neon balloons on the roof of the Rivergate through mud!
Then Sebastian Nemo relaxed back against the pile of coal with the missile launcher in his lap and waited.
Crock noticed it when they came out of a narrow fissure into what might actually be a cave—with an ominous red glow at the far end of it. He was so surprised, he almost stopped in his tracks, but Jack would have rear-ended him if he had. They were all huddled as close together as they could, shrinking involuntarily away from the horror that existed beyond the light.
What Crock noticed was that his leg where that boy had stabbed him with scissors had stopped hurting! Well, not entirely, but it hurt like it was supposed to—an amount of pain commensurate with the severity of the wound. Which was plenty. But it was nothing like the hot coal of agony that had kept him awake through the night. He’d never felt a pain like that in his life, a thrumming ache that—okay, this was nuts, but it was what it was—an ache that felt alive. Like it was wiggling and squirming and gnawing away at him deep inside. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, as he lay awake grinding his teeth to keep from moaning, he thought about that movie he’d gone to because everybody was talking about it and he was tired of having nothing to say. There was a little guy in it with furry feet, Frodo, who got stabbed by a see-through ghost king, and somebody, he couldn’t remember who, had said a piece of the blade had broken off inside him and was moving toward his heart. That was how Crock’s leg had felt.
Except it didn’t feel that way now. He tried to think when it had stopped throbbing, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d been concentrating so hard on not looking around, on seeing nothing but the top of Andi’s head and the back of that angel’s denim jacket that a shark could have bit his leg off at the knee and he wouldn’t have noticed. But he believed the pain had eased up as soon as that angel’s light touched him. Which made sense. Jack said evil couldn’t harm them—at least not physically—when they were protected by the angel’s light.
Would it start hurting again like that after this was over and—?
Blank.
Nothing there.
No room anywhere in his head to think about the world of sunshine, baseball games and triple-cheese pizzas and about this world of dark, unfathomable horror. One or the other. There was no way to consider any reality beyond this tunnel and a sound behind them like crinkling tissue paper and the light from the angel that left no shadows.
The red glow ahead was getting nearer with each step. Crock’s heart began to bang away in his chest and his terror began to swell, bigger and bigger, a sperm whale in a fish tank. The pressure of it made it hard to breathe.
God! Are you here? In the light maybe, in the sparkles?
That thing up there in front of us…I can’t…I’ve done some pretty sorry things in my life and he’s going to rub my nose in all of it. Theresa says we have to stand tall, be courageous and…God, I’m not brave. You know that. I’m the worst sniveling coward in the world. If there was any possible way I could get out of this right now, I would. I would! I’d leave the rest of them behind—sorry ’bout your luck—bolt out of here and never look back. I’m going to fail, God. I know it. He’s going to come after me and I won’t be able to hold it together. You shouldn’t have picked me. You should have tapped somebody else on the shoulder…anybody else. I’m telling you now while I can. You got the wrong guy in Charles Allen Crocker.
You got the wrong man in Jack Carpenter.
Jack thought it or prayed it. It was hard for him to tell here when he was praying and when he wasn’t. There were random, crazy thoughts in his head, firing like popcorn—the oil in the car needs changing…could he really find season tickets to the Reds’ games on eBay?—and a sickening terror groaned in his mind. Was he praying all that, too? Yeah, probably.
That last part, though, he knew that was a prayer.
You should have picked somebody else! Daniel could do this. I can’t. Why couldn’t you let me get my head chopped off and use Daniel to fight this monster? You need a man of faith and that’s not me. I’m…okay, here it is. Theresa would call this “truth in long johns with the butt flap down.” I don’t trust you, God. And most of the time, I don’t like you. You let good people, innocent people get hurt and die. You let this thing we’re facing come here and didn’t do a thing to stop it. Why not? You could have sent him back where he came from—but no, you’re making us do it for you. That pisses me off! See, I’m an angry, doubting man. How can you use a man like that?
And you let Andi get dragged into this. What’s wrong with you, God—how could you do a thing like that? She’s only a little girl! You have to protect her.
Look, if somebody’s got to get hurt here today…die here today…I volunteer. Take me. Keep her safe and take me. My life for Andi’s. Deal? Please!
<
I know I’m not supposed to be—I’m holding the hand of an angel—but God, I’m scared. I’m afraid of spiders and snakes. All crawly and slimy—I guess snakes are slimy. I never touched one, but they look slimy. I just…I want to go home!
Tears began to slide down Andi’s cheeks and she couldn’t do anything to stop them. Her lip was trembling and she bit it to keep from crying out loud.
The angel squeezed her hand then. She looked up into the angel’s face—she didn’t much look like Princess Buttercup anymore—and she saw an expression there like she used to see on her mommy’s face when she’d play possum, pretend to be asleep so she could watch Mommy stand in the doorway, looking down at her.
And that should have made her feel better, but it really made her feel worse because she was about to let the angel down. Let everybody down. She tried to tell the angel that she wanted to go home, she couldn’t do this, but if she stopped biting her lip to talk, she’d burst out crying.
I want my daddy! Please, God, don’t let those bad people chop off his head.
She sucked in a single sob at the image that burst into her mind of Daddy and Mr. Kendrick on their knees and the bad man with the sword behind them.
No, she couldn’t think about that or she’d start crying and never be able to stop. Uncle Jack had said if you cut off a snake’s head, the rest of it would die and that this monster thing was the snake’s head. If they…got rid of it or killed it or banished it or whatever they were supposed to do—the people it controlled wouldn’t be puppets anymore. That was the only hope Daddy had.
She squeezed the angel’s hand—hard. Didn’t look up at her this time, though. She had to concentrate on being brave, on being good and saying the right thing so this monster would go away and leave her and Daddy and the others alone.
Besides, it wouldn’t do any good to run away, to go home—God would just send a big fish or something after her. Miss Theresa had wanted to pick, to decide if she was going to do what God told her to do or not. So had Jonah. But they didn’t get to pick.
Andi Burke didn’t get to pick either.
But I’m so scared, God. I’m afraid I’ll cry or something—maybe wet my pants. How can I do this if I’m so scared?
There was a red glow at the end of the tunnel and it’d been getting bigger and bigger as they got near it. Now she could see the light was flickering like from a candle. At the far end, the tunnel turned to the left and the red light was coming from there.
He was in there. That thing. He was right around the corner. Andi took a deep, shuddering breath.
Help.
Her mind went suddenly blank and the only thing in it was that one word. Help. Not as a cry, a plea. Just a word. Help. Maybe that meant God was promising to help her! Or maybe it meant God was telling her to help somebody else.