Husk (36 page)

Rather than answer, Hale looked at Paul and asked, “Is your son’s name
Benjamin
Wiess?”

“
Yes.”

“
I think you’ll want to come with me.”

“
Why?” Paul asked.

Hale’s eyes flicked to Rebecca before answering—only for an instant, but long enough for Paul to catch a glimpse of the trepidation in the man’s otherwise unyielding expression. “I’m afraid there’s been a break-in at your house. I heard it over the radio just a little bit ago. Lori Hanlon was over there, right?”

“
She’s babysitting his son,” Rebecca answered for Paul.

 “
A break-in?” Paul repeated. “Are they—”

“
The kids are fine,” Hale assured. “Benjamin got out and made it to one of your neighbors, who called the police on a CB. I’ll escort you out there. We can see if Tim’s shown up, too.”

CHAPTER 44

Storm wind gusted into the treetops, fluttering dark leaves in chaotic waves, causing their boughs to creak with the sound of stretched ropes.

Melissa hurried after Frank with only the slashing beam of his flashlight to help her keep him in sight. He was almost forty yards ahead now. She increased her pace.

Lightning pulsed overhead, causing the woodland plant life to turn the ashen-gray color of dead worms drowned in a storm puddle. Amongst those trunks, a hundred shadows shifted location, trying to hide from the flash, or from her sight. The idea halted Melissa in her tracks and prompted her to bring up her pistol.

She turned in a circle, trying to cover every direction at once.

Regardless of his eccentricities, Frank had been right about the killer—no doubting that now. And with that fact in mind, she couldn’t help but wonder if one of the dark forms in the forest was actually the monster from the roadside, the beast that had been
inside
the gunman’s corpse.

The lightning blinked out once more and darkness fell in behind it. Nothing unearthly appeared.

Monsters
. What a ridiculous thought that would have seemed yesterday, or even hours ago. Now she expected them.

Melissa raced on through the prevailing dark, using a subsequent flash of lightning to guide her final steps to Frank’s side, not glancing at the trees again.

They’d come to the end of the road, where the gravel-packed stretch of land widened into a clearing, perceived at first only by the lack of hindrance to Frank’s flashlight beam when he panned it left and right.

They hadn’t been in the opening long enough to catch their breath when a third naked tree of electrical light spread its bright branches across the sky, revealing a church and cemetery in front of them.

“
How appropriate,” Melissa said, catching her breath.

Frank stared ahead and seemed to think aloud, saying, “We’ve found it.”

Before she could respond, he started moving again. She dashed after him, not resisting this time, and together they rushed across the dirt lot toward the cemetery.

A low fence surrounded the graveyard, and the gate’s hinges squealed when Frank swung it open.

He waded into the weeds of the churchyard ahead of her, shining his light on the half-hidden tombstones. Melissa followed, keeping her attention on the darkened windows of the cadaverous sanctuary.

Frank stopped two steps in front of her, and she bumped into his back.

She looked forward and discovered why he’d stopped.

In the circle of his flashlight beam, Melissa saw another teenager’s body. A sinkhole of gore marked the location of his left eye socket, and when Frank panned the light lower over the body, it revealed a score of ugly holes in his chest that looked like exit wounds.

She snapped up her gun.

Frank swung the light off the corpse and pointed it at the greater portion of the graveyard to their left.

“
What the hell?” she exclaimed, watching the body all but vanish from sight. “Point that thing back over here. What if this one—”

“
It won’t,” Frank cut in, speaking in words that seemed much too calm. “The entity can’t come in here. We’re safe.”

“
Bullshit.”

“
Trust me on this,” he responded, then started off to where he had angled his light.

Melissa stayed put, dividing her attention between the graves and the shaded body at her feet. Then Frank shouted her name with an urgency that compelled her to put aside her fear and join him.

“
Melissa, look.”

She found him facing one of the newer gravestones, his flashlight ray gleaming on its finished surface and blinding the words inscribed on it. More noticeable, however, were the piles of fresh earth heaped to each side of where the resident’s coffin should’ve been buried.

She opened her mouth to comment on the scene when her vision adjusted to the glare and focused on the headstone’s name. “Oh, my God. This is Kane’s grave.”

“
Yes, it is.”

Melissa stared at the open ground. The hole’s depth measured less than three or four feet, she guessed, not enough to have excavated a coffin, which meant the madman’s remains still rested at the bottom, under a moderate covering of dirt.

“
What now?” she asked, repressing a shudder.

“
It wants him back, all right,” Frank mumbled.

“
What?”

“
It wants him back,” he repeated, still talking to the stone. “It must be true, then. There must be a connection between them. That’s why it killed the Pattersons. Don’t you see? They were the closest people it could find to help it dig him up, the most
accessible
. But they must have resisted, so it killed them for their energy and moved on to the next closest place where it could find servants: the Andersons.”

 “
Help dig him up?” she echoed. “I don’t get it. Why would it need
help
to get at Kane if it can make its own body out of whatever it wants? And even if it did dig him up, what good would that do for either of them? Kane’s got to be halfway to being a worm-circus by now.”

Frank licked his lips before speaking. He appeared to be teetering on the brink of a great revelation. “This is holy ground,” he said. “The entity is a profane spirit; it
can’t
enter the cemetery itself, so it needed someone else to retrieve Kane’s body.”

“
But why bother?”

“
Like I said earlier, I think it wants to finish what they started five years ago, to bond together somehow. Oh, Lord, what if it has the power to bring him back? What if it can resurrect his soul somehow, because of their tie to one another?”

Frank swept a layer of sweat off his brow and rushed on, sorting out his sudden storm of ideas. “For five years, it’s been stuck in Kane’s half-dead body,” he said, “kept alive on life-support in the lockdown ward at the St. Peter’s Asylum, utterly powerless. But now the body’s dead, and it’s free again. It must have hung around the hospital for a few days, gathering its strength, using what energy it could get to cause other peoples’ deaths, probably by manipulating other medical equipment. I bet if you checked with the staff, they’d tell you there was an unusually high death toll the day Kane’s body died. After that, once it was strong enough, it must have come here to find Kane, homing in on him through whatever link they’d forged together all those years ago. Only it couldn’t get to him.”

Melissa shook her head. “That’s nonsense; it’s impossible.”

“
Everything we’ve seen tonight is impossible!”

She stared at him in silence, knowing she still clung to her old beliefs like a drowning swimmer in an ocean of uncertainty. She wanted to argue; she wanted to rationalize. But the last of her skepticism washed away when she recalled emptying her gun into a walking corpse.

“
Okay, forget the technical garbage. What do we do to stop it?”

A flash of lightning lit the area, and the bleak expression on his face chilled her to the core. “Wait a sec. Y-you do know how to stop it, right?”

“
I have some ideas.”

“
Ideas
?”

“
I’ve studied up on various religious ceremonies, exorcism methods and what not, but I can’t be positive they’ll work. I’m playing this by ear.”

“
Oh, terrific.”

Frank turned and headed for the cemetery gate, leaving Melissa dumbfounded.

“
That’s it?” she called. “Where are you going now?”

“
Kane’s body is safe for the time being,” he called over his shoulder. “The entity can’t get at him, but we still need to track it down. It’s already been here once, with those two kids, and it’s probably searching for someone else to lure here as we speak.”

They left the churchyard and jogged toward the main road. Melissa kept watch on the woods along the way, but tried not to let her imagination shape phantoms out of the shadows. Instead, she concentrated on forming a plan.

“
Okay, we know it wants Kane, so it’ll have to come back here sooner or later, right? Can’t we set up some kind of a trap for it, rig up a bucket of holy water or something? Better yet, why don’t we just dig up Kane for ourselves and set the bastard on fire?”

“
It’s not going to be that simple,” he replied. “For one thing, we can’t chance waiting for it to come to us. Before it returns here, it’ll probably try to disguise itself again, which means another human body. After that, it’ll need to find someone else it can use to do the shovel work. There are too many people at risk. Besides, if Kane and that monster are already half bonded, that may be the one thing keeping it from simply picking out a new follower and starting all over again. Kane’s body is the link between them; destroying it might set the entity free.”

“
You’re sure about that?”

“
Not really,” he answered. “But it’s possible. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been trapped in Kane for all those years. It would’ve abandoned him back in the cellar.”

Melissa clinched her fists. So much for the easy way out.

They returned to where Frank’s Blazer and the smashed sedan sat side-by-side on the far side of County Road 19, washed in the repetitive light of the one remaining police cruiser and numerous red flares the officers had put down to guide other vehicles around the wreckage. Not far away lay what remained of the teen-corpse’s charred body, tinted crimson by the flares.

“
An ambulance is on the way here for the bodies,” the single remaining officer said once they reemerged from the forest.

“
We need to get my truck back on the road,” Frank said to the man. “I’ve got tow straps in the back. Pull your cruiser up just ahead of me while I see if it still starts.”

Rather than follow Frank or the officer, Melissa paused to study the smoldering body on the blacktop. She approached cautiously and knelt a few feet from its heaped form. For a moment, she had the urge to reach out and touch it to verify that the night’s events weren’t apparitions in a dream.

“
I think there’s something you should know,” the uniformed officer said to Frank, apparently mistaking him for her partner. “Dispatch radioed another emergency call just a few minutes ago. Some lunatic attacked a kid and his babysitter with a knife at that subdivision outside Loretto.”

Melissa bolted to her feet. “That’s the Andersons’ neighborhood,” she gasped. “Where did it happen, what house?”

The officer recited the address. “One of our guys is already there. Looks like both the kids are unhurt, but the perp got away.”

Melissa shot a distressed look at Frank.

“
We have to hurry,” he answered. “It may already have a body preserved in the area that it can use, like it did with the Damerows. Maybe Judge Anderson? And we need to get those kids somewhere safe. The boy must be part of this, and if it tried for him once it might come after him again. That could work to our advantage. Maybe we can catch it while it’s still in a physical form.”

“
What exactly is going on here?” the confused officer asked.

They didn’t have time to answer.

CHAPTER 45

The throb of firelight against the barn’s walls and rafters could no longer match the pace of Mallory’s pounding heart.

Derrick kissed her mouth, her cheek, her neck. He nibbled at her ear; she hadn’t expected such a thing to be so arousing. He kissed her neck again, her throat, cheek, then returned to her lips.

They slid closer together. Derrick ran one hand through her hair, then the other across her thigh.

She tingled with excitement, wanting to close her eyes and enjoy the exhilaration of the moment, but she couldn’t stop glancing over his shoulder, afraid one of her friends might ascend into the loft and see them. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, wanted to feel the contours of his body, but nervousness paralyzed her muscles.

Outside, another cycle of flashes shone through the barn’s weathered siding, casting bluish-white bands across the floor. Thunder growled, shaking the air with its low-end vibrations.

Derrick’s hand slid along her leg, caressing it, moving to her waist. He found the hem of her shirt, and Mallory tensed when his fingers passed from her shorts to the bare skin of her belly. His hand ascended the curve of her abdomen, climbing her ribcage, moving toward her chest.