by Jeff Lindsay
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If rush-hour traffic is utter mayhem, then rush-hour traffic with a hurricane coming is end-of-the-world, we’re-all-going-to-die-but-you-go-first insanity. People were driving as if they positively had to kill everyone else who might come between them and getting their plywood and batteries. It was not a terribly long drive to Deborah’s little house in Coral Gables, but when I finally pulled into her driveway I felt as if I had survived an Apache manhood ordeal.
As I climbed out of the car, the front door of the house swung open and Chutsky came out. “Hey, buddy,” he called. He gave me a cheerful wave with the steel hook where his left hand used to be and came down the walkway to meet me. “I really appreciate the help. This goddamned hook makes it kind of tough to put the wing nuts on.”
“And even harder to pick your nose,” I said, just a little irritated by his cheerful suffering.
But instead of taking offense, he laughed. “Yeah. And a whole lot harder to wipe my ass. Come on. I got all the stuff out in back.”
I followed him around to the back of the house, where Deborah had a small overgrown patio. But to my great surprise, it was no longer overgrown. The trees that had hung over the area were trimmed back, and the weeds growing up between the flagstones were all gone. There were three neatly pruned rosebushes and a bank of ornamental flowers of some kind, and a neatly polished barbecue grill stood in one corner.
I looked at Chutsky and raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s maybe a little bit gay, right?” He shrugged. “I get real bored sitting around here healing, and anyway I like to keep things neatened up a little more than your sister.”
“It looks very nice,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said, as if I really had accused him of being gay.
“Well, let’s get this done.” He nodded toward a stack of corrugated steel leaning against the side of the house—Deborah’s hurricane shutters. The Morgans were second-generation Floridians, and Harry had raised us to use good shutters. Save a little money on the shutters, spend a lot more replacing the house when they failed.
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The downside to the high quality of Deborah’s shutters, though, was that they were very heavy and had sharp edges. Thick gloves were necessary—or in Chutsky’s case, one glove. I’m not sure he appreciated the cash he was saving on gloves, though. He seemed to work a little harder than he had to, in order to let me know that he was not really handicapped and didn’t actually need my help.
At any rate, it was only about forty minutes before we had all the shutters in their tracks and locked on. Chutsky took a last look at the ones that covered the French doors of the patio and, apparently satisfied with our outstanding craftsmanship, he raised his left arm to wipe the sweat from his brow, catching himself at the very last moment before he rammed the hook through his cheek.
He laughed a little bitterly, staring at the hook.
“I’m still not used to this thing,” he said, shaking his head. “I wake up in the night and the missing knuckle itches.”
It was difficult to think of anything clever or even socially acceptable to say to that. I had never read anywhere what to say to someone speaking of having feeling in his amputated hand. Chutsky seemed to feel the awkwardness, because he gave me a small dry snort of non-humorous amusement.
“Hey, well,” he said, “there’s still a couple of kicks left in the old mule.” It seemed to me an unfortunate choice of words, since he was also missing his left foot, and any kicking at all seemed out of the question. Still, I was pleased to see him coming out of his depression, so it seemed like a good thing to agree with him.
“No one ever doubted it,” I said. “I’m sure you’re going to be fine.”
“Uh-huh, thanks,” he said, not very convincingly. “Anyway, it’s not you I have to convince. It’s a couple of old desk jockies inside the Beltway. They’ve offered me a desk job, but . . .” He shrugged.
“Come on now,” I said. “You can’t really want to go back to the cloak-and-dagger work, can you?”
“It’s what I’m good at,” he said. “For a while there, I was the very best.”
“Maybe you just miss the adrenaline,” I said.
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“Maybe,” he said. “How about a beer?”
“Thank you,” I said, “but I have orders from on high to get bottled water and ice before it’s all gone.”
“Right,” he said. “Everybody’s terrified they might have to drink a mojito without ice.”
“It’s one of the great dangers of a hurricane,” I said.
“Thanks for the help,” he said.
If anything, traffic was even worse as I headed for home. Some of the people were hurrying away with their precious sheets of plywood tied to their car roofs as if they had just robbed a bank. They were angry from the tension of standing in line for an hour wondering if someone would cut in front of them and whether there would be anything left when it was their turn.
The rest of the people on the road were on their way to take their places in these same lines and hated everyone who had gotten there first and maybe bought the last C battery in Florida.
Altogether, it was a delightful mixture of hostility, rage, and paranoia, and it should have cheered me up immensely. But any hope of good cheer vanished when I found myself humming something, a familiar tune that I couldn’t quite place, and couldn’t stop humming. And when I finally did place it, all the joy of the festive evening was shattered.
It was the music from my sleep.
The music that had played in my head with the feeling of heat and the smell of something burning. It was plain and repetitive and not a terribly catchy bit of music, but here I was humming it to myself on South Dixie Highway, humming and feeling comfort from the repeating notes as if it was a lullaby my mother used to sing.
And I still didn’t know what it meant.
I am sure that whatever was happening in my subconscious was caused by something simple, logical, and easy to understand.
On the other hand, I just couldn’t think of a simple, logical, and easy-to-understand reason for hearing music and feeling heat on my face in my sleep.
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My cell phone started to buzz, and since traffic was crawling along anyway, I answered it.
“Dexter,” Rita said, but I barely recognized her voice. She sounded small, lost, and completely defeated. “It’s Cody and Astor,” she said. “They’re gone.”
Things were really working out quite well. The new hosts were wonderfully cooperative. They began to gather, and with a little bit of persuasion, they easily came to follow IT’s suggestions about behavior. And they built great stone buildings to hold IT’s offspring, dreamed up elaborate ceremonies with music to put them in a trance state, and they became so enthusiastically helpful that for a while there were just too many of them to keep up with. If things went well for the hosts, they killed a few of their number out of gratitude. If things went badly, they killed in the hope that IT would make things better. And all IT had to do was let it happen.
And with this new leisure, IT began to consider the result of IT’s reproductions. For the first time, when the swelling and bursting came, IT
reached out to the newborn, calming it down, easing its fear, and sharing consciousness. And the newborn responded with gratifying eagerness, quickly and happily learning all that IT had to teach and gladly joining in. And then there were four of them, then eight, sixty-four—and suddenly it was too much. With that many, there was simply not enough to go around. Even the new hosts began to balk at the number of victims they needed.
IT was practical, if nothing else. IT quickly realized the problem, and solved it—by killing almost all of the others IT had spawned. A few escaped, out into the world, in search of new hosts. IT kept just a few with IT, and things were under control at l
ast.
Sometime later, the ones who fled began to strike back. They set up their rival temples and rituals and sent their armies at IT, and there were so many. The upheaval was enormous and lasted a very long time. But because IT was the oldest and most experienced, IT eventually vanquished all the others, except for a few who went into hiding.
The others hid in scattered hosts, keeping a low profile, and many survived. But IT had learned over the millennia that it was important to wait.
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IT had all the time there was, and IT could afford to be patient, slowly hunt out and kill the ones who fled, and then slowly, carefully, build back up the grand and wonderful worship of ITself.
IT kept IT’s worship alive; hidden, but alive.
And IT waited for the others.
T H I R T Y - S E V E N
As I know very well, the world is not a nice place.
There are numberless awful things that can happen, especially to children: they can be taken by a stranger or a family friend or a divorced dad; they can wander away and vanish, fall in a sinkhole, drown in a neighbor’s pool—and with a hurricane coming there were even more possibilities. The list is limited only by their imaginations, and Cody and Astor were quite well supplied with imagination.
But when Rita told me they were gone, I did not even consider sinkholes or traffic accidents or motorcycle gangs. I knew what had happened to Cody and Astor, knew it with a cold, hard certainty that was more clear and positive than anything the Passenger had ever whispered to me. One thought burst in my head, and I never questioned it.
In the half a second it took to register Rita’s words my brain flooded with small pictures: the cars following me, the night visi-tors knocking on the doors and windows, the scary guy leaving his calling card with the kids, and, most convincingly, the searing statement uttered by Professor Keller: “Moloch liked human sacrifice.
Especially children.”
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I did not know why Moloch wanted my children in particular, but I knew without the slightest doubt that he, she, or it had them. And I knew that this was not a good thing for Cody and Astor.
I lost no time getting home, swerving through the traffic like the Miami native I am, and in just a few minutes I was out of the car.
Rita stood in the rain at the end of the driveway, looking like a small, desolate mouse.
“Dexter,” Rita said, with a world of emptiness in her voice.
“Please, oh God, Dexter, find them.”
“Lock the house,” I said, “and come with me.”
She looked at me for a moment as if I had said to leave the kids and go bowling. “Now,” I said. “I know where they are, but we need help.”
Rita turned and ran to the house and I pulled out my cell phone and dialed.
“What,” Deborah answered.
“I need your help,” I said.
There was a short silence and then a hard bark of not-amused laughter. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “There’s a hurricane coming in, the bad guys are lined up five deep all over town waiting for the power to go out, and you need my help.”
“Cody and Astor are gone,” I said. “Moloch has them.”
“Dexter,” she said.
“I have to find them fast, and I need your help.”
“Get over here,” she said.
As I put my phone away Rita came splattering down the sidewalk through the puddles that were already forming. “I locked up,”
she said. “But Dexter, what if they come back and we’re gone?”
“They won’t come back,” I said. “Not unless we bring them back.” Apparently that was not the reassuring remark she was hoping for. She stuffed a fist into her mouth and looked like she was trying very hard not to scream. “Get in the car, Rita,” I said. I opened the door for her and she looked at me over her half-digested knuckles. “Come on,” I said, and she finally climbed in. I got behind the wheel, started up, and nosed the car out of the driveway.
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she had removed the fist from her mouth, “you said you know where they are.”
“That’s right,” I said, turning onto U.S. 1 without looking and accelerating through the thinning traffic.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“I know who has them,” I said. “Deborah will help us find out where they went.”
“Oh God, Dexter,” Rita said, and she began to weep silently.
Even if I wasn’t driving I wouldn’t know what to do or say about that, so I simply concentrated on getting us to headquarters alive.
A telephone rang in a very comfortable room. It did not give out an undignified chirping, or a salsa tune, or even a fragment of Beetho-ven, as modern cell phones do. Instead, it purred with a simple old-fashioned sound, the way telephones are supposed to ring.
And this conservative sound went well with the room, which was elegant in a very reassuring way. It contained a leather couch and two matching chairs, all worn just enough to give the feeling of a favorite pair of shoes. The telephone sat on a dark mahogany end table on the far side of the room, next to a bar made of matching wood.
Altogether the room had the relaxed and timeless feel of a very old and well-established gentlemen’s club, except for one detail: the wall space between the bar and the couch was taken up by a large wooden case with a glass front, looking something like a cross between a trophy case and a shelf for rare books. But instead of flat shelves, the case was fitted with hundreds of felt-lined niches. Just over half of them cradled a skull-sized ceramic of a bull’s head.
An old man entered the room, without haste, but also without the careful hesitance of frail old age. There was a confidence in his walk that is usually found only in much younger men. His hair was white and full and his face was smooth, as if it had been polished by the desert wind. He walked to the telephone like he was quite sure that whoever was calling would not hang up until he an-
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swered, and apparently he was right, since it was still ringing when he lifted the receiver.
“Yes,” he said, and his voice, too, was much younger and stronger than it should have been. As he listened he picked up a knife that lay on the table beside the telephone. It was of ancient bronze. The pommel was curved into a bull’s head, the eyes set with two large rubies, and the blade was traced with gold letters that looked very much like MLK. Like the old man, the knife was much older than it looked, and far stronger. He idly ran a thumb along the blade as he listened, and a line of blood rose up on his thumb. It didn’t seem to affect him. He put the knife down.
“Good,” he said. “Bring them here.” He listened again for a moment, idly licking the blood from his thumb. “No,” he said, running his tongue along his lower lip. “The others are already gathering.
The storm won’t affect Moloch, or his people. In three thousand years, we’ve seen far worse, and we’re still here.”
He listened again for a moment before interrupting with just a trace of impatience. “No,” he said. “No delays. Have the Watcher bring him to me. It’s time.”
The old man hung up the telephone and stood for a moment.
Then he picked up the knife again, and an expression grew on his smooth old face.
It was almost a smile.
The wind and the rain were gusting fiercely but only occasionally, and most of Miami was already off the roads and filling out insurance claim forms for the damage they planned to have, so the traffic was not bad. One very intense blast of wind nearly pushed us off the expressway, but other than that it was a quick trip.
Deborah was waiting for us at the front desk. “Come to my office,” she said, “and tell me what you know.” We followed her to the elevator and went up.
“Office” was a bit of an exaggeration for the place where
Deborah worked. It was a cubicle in a room with several others just like it. Crammed into the space was a desk and chair and two folding 282
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chairs for guests, and we settled in. “All right,” she said. “What happened?”
“They . . . I sent them out into the yard,” Rita said. “To get all their toys and things. For the hurricane.”
Deborah nodded. “And then?” she prompted.
“I went in to put away the hurricane supplies,” she said. “And when I came out they were gone. I didn’t—it was only a couple of minutes, and they . . .” Rita put her face in her hands and sobbed.
“Did you see anyone approach them?” Deborah asked. “Any strange cars in the neighborhood? Anything at all?”
Rita shook her head. “No, nothing, they were just gone.”
Deborah looked at me. “What the hell, Dexter,” she said.
“That’s it? The whole story? How do you know they’re not playing Nintendo next door?”
“Come on, Deborah,” I said. “If you’re too tired to work, tell us now. Otherwise, stop the crap. You know as well as I do—”
“I don’t know anything like it, and neither do you,” she snapped.
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” I said, and I found that my tone was sharpening to match hers, which was a bit of a surprise. Emotion? Me? “That business card he left with Cody tells us everything we need to know.”
“Except where, why, and who,” she snarled. “And I’m still waiting to hear some hints about that.”
Even though I was perfectly prepared to snarl right back at her, there was really nothing to snarl. She was right. Just because Cody and Astor were missing, that didn’t mean we suddenly had new information that would lead us to our killer. It only meant that the stakes were considerably higher, and that we were out of time.
