Dark to Mortal Eyes (43 page)

“Not so fast!” Marsh growled, grasping the necklace and wrenching it into a noose around the ghastly neck.

The creature froze. Hacked. Choked.

“Not this time.” Marsh spoke through gritted teeth. “Score one for me.”

The eyes burst into emerald flame, and the voice burned like alcohol in his face. “You’ll never win. You logical ones—ha!—you’re the easiest to fool. How can you defeat something that you don’t even believe exists?”

“Like this!”

With a yank on the noose of pearls, he tried to bring the creature down. His shoulders and chest strained until sweat broke through his pores, yet to no avail. The eyes taunted him; the hands pried him loose with supernatural strength.

“No!”

Kara was astride the bony back, tears streaking her cheeks. Her hands
clawed at the dry hair, came away with clumps of dead grass. The specter collapsed to its knees and fell back onto Kara so that, in Marsh’s grasp, the twisted necklace ground into bone. He heard a snap. It wasn’t, however, the sound of victory; it was the sound of jewelry splitting apart at the clasp. Pearls slithered down the broken strand, rolled off bony shoulders, and dissolved into drops of sizzling acid.

Landing one by one on Kara’s chest.

“Aarhh! My … heart,” she groaned. She was pinned beneath the cadaverous being. “Marsh, why did you … 
Aarhh!
”

He stretched out his hand to intercept the burning pearls and caught two in his palm. On his own skin, they had a numbing effect. His hand became a nerveless slab, an ice sculpture attached to an arm. The pearls ran in beads off the specter’s shoulders, and from the milky white curvature of each one, coy faces winked in Marsh’s direction. Faces from a pool of cyberimagery, harmless visual stimuli.

Hey, it wasn’t cheating to browse around on the computer. He was a man. Only natural.

But why the faces? Why now?

As the single remaining pearl landed on Kara’s heaving ribs, the specter cackled. Then, in an instant, the being crumbled into a powdery silt, lingering midair before rotating up into the suction of the fan blades. The blades screeched, the motor seized, and the bathroom lights sparked in a meteoric shower of orange that faded into black.

“Kara?”

On hands and knees, Marsh searched the floor. Where was she? She was gone. He was alone in the darkness with the hiss of the shower, the screech of the fan, and the sounds of his wife’s pain still ringing in his ears.

God, forgive me. What’ve I done?

The light went off. Josee’s eyes analyzed the darkness. The lamp was still at her back, the digital clock read a quarter to eleven, and the music had played itself out, leaving her with the sounds of fading thunder and the swoosh of cloth behind her.

“Who is that?” She whiplashed in the bed to face the intruder. “What’re you doing? Why’d you turn that off?”

“Shhh, it’s all right. Just me, babe.”

“Scooter, that’s not even funny. What’re you doing sneaking in here?” She reached for the switch, but a hand clamped over hers.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “It’s their fault. I don’t want you to see me.”

Josee wrested her hand from his and turned on the lamp despite his warning. Scooter’s face floated near hers, a visage of fear and conflicting emotion. “You scared the heck outta me,” she told him. She stood and wrapped the bedspread over her shoulders. Waiting by the door, with her back to the wall, she said, “Go back to bed, okay?”

“I’m afraid of what they’ll make me do.”

“They? What do they want you to do? Scoot, who’re you talking about?”

He lowered his eyes, took a step toward the hallway. His shoulders were quivering with immense struggle; his breath, cold and dank, lifted the tiny hairs on her arm. “They want to control me. Not just me. They also want—”

With a movement too quick to counter, Scooter pinned her arm to the wall and tugged at the lamp cord. The blackness left her momentarily blinded. Josee shoved back against him, but he evaded her, and without warning his mouth was pressed against hers, grinding, teeth colliding, freezing cold, before she wrenched her face from his and thrust a knee up between his legs.

Scooter collapsed on the floor with a grunt.

Josee dove across the bed and turned on the other lamp. She crouched there on the floor, breathless, and watched him pick himself off the carpet.

“Scooter!” she gasped. “You’re supposed to be my friend. I’m supposed to be able to trust you!” Tears swelled at the corners of her eyes and burned trails down into the collar of her shirt. “What’s got into you? You try to deny what happened yesterday morning, but I saw it. You were poisoned by … by something evil. You’ve never done this to me before. Never! Scoot, I can’t handle this. I’m not gonna put up with it. Are you hearing me? Say something!”

“Josee, it’s not me.”

“What is it then?”

“I’m trying to hold them off. I really am.” The shame in his eyes was real, yet as he lifted his countenance into pink illumination, the bite marks on his cheek bulged, and cords rippled beneath the skin, knotting his face, tugging at his lips. He avoided her eyes, then locked on to them with brown irises ablaze. “No, that was not nice of me. I didn’t want to. But they’re … telling me things to do.”

“Well, don’t freakin’ do them!”

He whispered, “You know, you were right about what you said. I did see what happened yesterday. Right as that snake reached my ring, it turned on me.” He twisted the moonstone on his finger, and a pallid light swirled in the stone. “I don’t know what to do, Josee, don’t know how to deal with it. I mean, how did you stop it?”

“I called for help. That’s what I did.”

“Nobody can help.”

“It was a prayer of faith.”
A withered seed … Please, Jesus … save us
.

“To God? Jesus?” His words turned colder, a glacial wind sweeping over the bed. “Where are they now, huh? Tell me that. I don’t see anyone. And you know why? Because God’s not here, that’s why. Don’t tell me you’re falling back into that.”

“But that’s what faith is, believing in something you can’t see.”

Scooter gripped his face in his hands as the poison coiled beneath his cheeks. He began to whimper. “Sorry, babe, I don’t wanna do it. They’re telling me things. Bad things. They want your help. They want the key.”

“The key?” Josee recalled Chief Braddock’s enigmatic remarks in the elevator.

Scooter said, “Maybe together, we can … No, I can’t do this.”

“Scooter, please go back to bed.”

“You hate me. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t hate you, but don’t ever do something like that again. I mean it.”

A knock at the door caused them to turn. John stepped in and said, “Everything okay in here? I was lying in bed when a cold sweat broke over me. Got a feeling I should check on you. Scooter, it might be wise to return to your room now.”

Scooter shrunk away, his hands trying to hold together the contortions of his face, the ring on his finger guiding him in a death march down the hall.

Josee’s lips were cold. Her heart, too.

Breathing deeply against a suffocating sense of danger, she went into the bathroom and locked the door. Double-checked it. Climbed into the shower. She reflected on those first weeks after she had opened her heart to the concept of a personal God. She was nine, maybe ten. Experiencing a peace she couldn’t explain and an assurance that she was no longer alone. Put up for adoption, yes, but never truly abandoned.

Prince of peace. Mighty God. Father to the fatherless.

At sixteen, all that changed.

One evening after a game night in the church gym, the youth minister had offered her a ride home. It was late, he said. Dangerous out there. Josee, apprehensive about walking the dark streets of Renton, succumbed.

The streets would have been safer.

What she saw in the man’s eyes that night was frightening. Evil. Like spilled ink, it shaded his face and, by the time he was done, scrawled an indelible hate letter on her heart. In the corner of an abandoned lot, she witnessed the spiritual dark side of a man who claimed to be in the light. Begging her silence, he apologized with tears, explained how lonely the job was, how attractive he found her.

Which only deepened her hatred.

Josee never returned to that church. And she never told a soul.

Only you know, Lord. Where were you, huh? And what about Scooter tonight?

As she had those years ago, she stood under the shower’s stream and cranked up the heat until it was almost unbearable. Back then, she had taken two, three, sometimes four showers a day. Scalding away the dirt. Burning the filth from her skin.

Josee heaved a sigh. The water ran down her face in huge drops as she remembered the day she’d heard the news that the youth pastor had been caught. She hadn’t been the first victim, or the last. The church was torn over it, and two of the council members resigned, saying that when they had seen disturbing signs and called out a warning, no one had responded. Had God been trying to work through those two members?

Maybe he
had
been there all along.

Yet the senior pastor had sloughed off the council members’ concerns.

Okay, so people had free will. God wasn’t going to force them to listen and act; he hadn’t programmed people like robots to carry out their master’s every whim. Still, if the heavenly plan was to work through earthly servants, it was no wonder things got so messed up. Could she pin all of that on God?

Josee felt the myrtlewood cross wet against her chest. She clutched it and closed her eyes. The spraying water drilled against her eyelids. She thought:
To hold on is to believe; to believe is to wrestle with my doubts and questions; to wrestle is to risk injury from a God who seems large and strong yet distant
.

But hadn’t he also risked injury—even death—to draw near?

Jesus, was it hard for you down here? Not on the grandiose scale, but in the day-to-day things. I’m so tired of it all. Only twenty-two. Does it get any easier?

Timberwolf Lane led Stahlherz through the storm’s aftermath back toward the highway. He stepped over fallen branches, trudged through piled sand. By the time he reached the Sand Dollar Diner, his leg bones had turned into cinnamon toothpicks—hot and ready to snap.

He saw no sign of Darius or the Aerostar van.

Stahlherz remained calm. He had instructed his driver to check back every half-hour. A quarter to eleven now. A fifteen-minute wait.

He went into the diner to keep watch from the window but found himself
in a haze. Two burly men in red-and-black flannel shirts smoked at the bar, tapping ashes into their water glasses while glowering at the sitcom on the television above the food-prep station. At a corner table a teenage couple held hands and giggled.

“Just one, or you got more comin’, sweetheart?”

“One.” Stahlherz held up a finger for the waitress. “Nonsmoking, please.”

“It’s all nonsmokin’,” she told him. “Don’t mind Donny and Red.”

“The smoke irritates me, ma’am. Would you mind—”

“They’d mind, and our regulars get special privileges. If that’s a problem for you, you’ll have to take it up with the management.”

“Where is the manager?”

“Home. Sleepin’.” She teased her bangs, went cross-eyed for a second as she assessed the results, then handed him a plastic menu. “Find yourself a spot to get comfy, and I’ll be with you in a minute, sweetie.”

Stahlherz sipped coffee for the next ten minutes. Still no sign of Darius.

The news, however, provided satisfactory distraction. He warmed to the face of young Beau Connors on the television. The news anchor reported that a respected and well-liked Corvallis woman had vanished, her car had been discovered in a ravine, and this young man had turned himself in only hours ago, claiming to be her abductor. The police were investigating the claim, as well as his threats against the citizens of Oregon. A live feed took viewers to a condemned shack in Philomath where detectives had discovered a van linked to Beau Connors. A bomb squad had ruled out any attached explosive devices, but a Detective Randolph had found in the glove box an envelope laced with white powder. In light of similar scares after 9/11, investigators were sending the envelope to a lab to determine whether anthrax was involved. As for Mrs. Kara Addison, she had not yet been found. The anchor instructed viewers with any information to call the number on the screen.