Both of the windows had been pushed up and she bared her teeth against the cold.
What had they heard upstairs, really? The house settling as interior heat and exterior cold shrank and expanded the wood? Had the windows already been open? Maybe he had been staining something and needed ventilation? She had felt the cold in her bones even inside, even next to the woodstove.
Or was the son of a bitch waiting for her in the master bedroom, thinking he’d bully her into a goodbye fuck before he threw her out?
“Jim!” A whisper loud enough to make whispering pointless. Still, her vocal cords weren’t quite ready to relax themselves yet. Maybe when she saw him, maybe when it was time to tell him exactly what she thought of him…
She heard the shifting drapes before she reached the open door to the master bedroom and paused. These were of heavier material and didn’t flutter like the gossamer things in the other rooms, designed to keep him in unlit hibernation on weekend mornings when he needed to sleep it off. Instead, they shifted and rippled enough that she knew the windows behind them were open, but details beyond that sense of movement were hard to make out.
She pushed the open door against the wall and knew he was not waiting for her there. “Jim,” she whispered, “You better not be screwing around.” The smell struck her then, meaty and moist.
She stepped inside and held her gun out, turning at the waist to track the weapon around the room as she felt for the wall switch, finding the wet plastic plate and flicking it with no result. She wiped her hand on her shirt and took another step inside, opening her mouth to call out, loudly this time, when the darkness shimmered to her right.
She jumped back and jabbed her pistol at the motion as her fist tightened on the weapon and it bucked in her hand with a deafening bang.
Stunned, she froze in place for a moment as her ears rang before she ran to the heavy drapes and jerked them aside to let in the moonlight.
A piece of glass tumbled free from the standing mirror in the corner and she realized she had been fooled, spinning wildly to jab the shaking revolver at the man sitting in the rocking chair.
“Jim? Oh shit, I didn’t mean to pull…”
He was looking up at her from the chair holding something wet and glistening against his belly. She stepped closer, aware of the thickening smell as she struggled to understand that the wetness he held was his belly.
“Are you all right? What happened?” she asked.
“Cat,” he said, and his voice came to her as if through a congealing liquid.
She looked around the room warily and moved until she could see into the adjoining bathroom.
Empty.
“Get up,” she hissed, grabbing his arm. He moaned as she pulled him, and the chair began to come up with him before she let him fall back with a crash.
“What happened?”
“You…you…” Thick tributaries ran from the corners of his mouth and she touched him, pushing aside squeamishness as she patted his torso for a wound amidst the liquid, the blood warmer than she had imagined blood would be. Her fingers strayed across a knobby piece of wood in his gut, and she stepped around the chair with mounting horror as she saw the shining end of gardening shears pinning him to the rocker.
Her mind went white as she backed away, forgetting the gun as she clapped a hand to her mouth to hold back the rising scream.
When the backs of her knees bumped into the mattress she did scream, long and howling, and bolted for the door like a woman gone mad, never seeing the pale hands that lunged from beneath the bed, clamping onto her ankles like cruel manacles of ice as she fell headlong. The floor was carpeted, but even so the breath exploded from her body. She was incapable of anything other than mindless writhing as she was dragged by the feet into the origin and endpoint of every childhood nightmare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
- 1 -
A man named Clark Lorraine stepped off the jetway from Lufthansa flight 772, Vienna to Montreal. He made his way through the bustle of the busy Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport, passing through customs easily and pausing to buy a black coffee after waiting in line at a Tim Hortons in the terminal. He looked much the same as the other businessmen emerging from the flight, tired eyes beneath hair cut so short he was nearly bald. Round, steel-rimmed spectacles, a London Fog raincoat and carrying a slightly battered briefcase with a nylon bag over his shoulder.
Though he had checked two suitcases in Vienna, Lorraine made no effort to retrieve them from the baggage claim. Instead, he checked himself into a downtown hotel, the Intercontinental, and made a reservation—with the assistance of a helpful concierge—at the excellent Tocque restaurant, after which he retired to his room.
The shower was an indulgence, one of few he allowed himself, and the over-priced cashews from the minibar were necessary fuel for his badly fatigued body.
Lorraine emptied the contents of the nylon bag onto the soft, white coverlet of the queen-size bed, ignoring the pang of regret that he would not be sleeping in it. He stripped down to his socks and stale boxer shorts before pulling on creased Levi’s and a black Boston Bruins hoodie. A blue windbreaker went over the hoodie and he pulled on a black knit cap also sporting the gold, black and white Bruins logo.
He left Lorraine’s belongings in the room when he departed and dropped the glasses in a curbside trash can. Lorraine was burned. Gone. He would never walk the earth again, and the paperwork that Lewis Edgar had retrieved from a locker in Frankfurt had no more value.
Sean Finnegan headed for the train station on foot, grinning at the occasional catcall from Montreal locals and pausing to banter with two Montreal cops who gave him a bit of good-natured shit about the score that night, and the season in general, before he entered the station and queued up for the train south.
US Customs was stern and militant in comparison with their Canadian counterparts, but the Bruins sweatshirt brought the right sort of derision from the New York-based agent, and threats about keeping Boston fans where they belonged—outside the borders. They talked about the score for a moment and how damned good the Montreal Canadiens were, and Finnegan commiserated about the plight of the Islanders.
After ten hours aboard the train, without incident beyond a truly heinous microwaved cheeseburger from the café car, Finnegan emerged in New York City’s chaotic Penn Station. He pushed down the crowded sidewalk on Thirty-Second Street, pausing to offer his sweatshirt to a bearded homeless man who said, “Bruins? C’mon, man,” before finding the Avis rental office a block south on Thirty-First Street.
The gold Kia was not his choice, but it was what they had on short notice, and he ground his way through honking traffic to the Westside Highway where he headed north.
He was in a realm well past fatigue by this point, his mind stretched out of shape by tension, violence and repeated blows to what he thought of as reality.
But he was close. He had crossed a continent and an ocean already, and knowing that it was only a matter of hours before he would see his wife and daughter filled him with a golden flame that fed his starved circuits and kept him functioning.
Lewis kept his speed even as he headed north on Interstate 287. He would drive up through Vermont before hooking east into New Hampshire.
The hours in transit had given him time to assess what he had experienced and gain some measure of acceptance with the idea of an unnatural or supernatural event. Understanding that he had witnessed some collision of supernatural powers was a step he could climb up to, but the kind old monk’s talk of God and the holiness of the nonnen grew harder to hold onto the farther he went from the man. Still, he could reconcile himself to the idea of a territorial collision. Whatever was pursuing him had entered into the realm of the nonnen and, like predators in the wild, the two powers had clashed.
Lucien had said, “It is not important that you believe in what happened the way I, a Catholic, believes. Only that you accept that it was real.”
Lewis could work with th
at.
He did not believe, and neither did Lucien, that his pursuer was destroyed, only temporarily vanquished. In preparation for meeting his hunter again, Lucien had taken Lewis’s confession and blessed him in the name of God and the four brave nuns. The monk confessed his own ignorance to the nonnen’s ability to extend their protection across the Atlantic, but begged Lewis to find a church in America and take of the blood and flesh, confessing again if he felt able.
Lewis knew of a small Catholic church in the next town over from Flintlock, and he would stop there. Strangely, though Lewis had made a profession of deception, he found himself unwilling to break his promise to Lucien.
He would seek a blessing, hoping for some benefit despite his doubts, after which he would find his wife and child.
“I’m coming, guys,” he said in a voice so coarse as to be unrecognizable. He glanced in the rearview mirror at his red-veined eyes and willed his thoughts outward.
After ascertaining his family’s safety he would head south again. He expected Bierce would not be happy to see him.
- 2 -
Cat awoke in pain, suffocating, struggling to move but unable, pressed between a sandwich of wood mashing her nose, breasts and hips from above and her shoulder blades and buttocks below. Naked and crushed in a claustrophobe’s nightmare, the needle-sharp teeth of panic tearing into her mind.
Her scream was an animal thing, no more hers to call back than was the summer, and her mouth was filled with sawdust and fibers. She coughed, triggering violent eruptions as she convulsed in the great vise holding her until the motion subsided and she stilled, weeping quietly.
She could feel footsteps approaching, hard-soled shoes on a hardwood floor like the one in their bedroom at home. The steps drew closer, measured as a heartbeat, until they seemed to stop directly above her and she felt as if a weight was added to the pressure on her rib cage.
She heard the grunt of someone kneeling and then something tapping on the wood until a slim board was pried up with a great screeching of nails. Cat greedily sucked in air, bloodied nose throbbing in relief.
A familiar brass candlestick was lowered to the floor next to the opening, and in its uneven yellow light she saw a man in a neat business suit lean down, his face drawn by leering shadows into the villain from a black-and-white movie.
“I honestly don’t know what advice to give you,” the man said, pained. “I don’t know if you should tell him what he wants to know immediately, or hold out as long as you can. I believe he will make this last no matter what you choose. Your horror is his sustenance. And this will be horrifying.”
“Mr. Bierce,” Cat strained to say, her voice constricted.
“I fear he will toy with you as a cat with a mouse. I…” Bierce looked away, turning back with a thin board in his hand. Tiny red flames danced in his eyes. “I have been instructed…” And his pause gave silent voice to the horror of this instruction. “I have been instructed to give you this.”
He held up a square of shiny paper and lifted the candle closer until she could make out the three of them: Lewis, beaming; Hedde, young enough to grin; and herself, hair blowing across her own face.
“Why?” she managed.
Bierce moved the edge of the picture into the dancing flame and the photo caught alight. He dropped the flaming meteor of her family onto her bared skin and she gasped at the contact.
“Don’t—” Cat tried to scream as he slapped the board down into place and began hammering nails into it while she thrashed. She cried out when she felt the sharp bite of steel in her left breast and in her ribs. A small blessing, the flame was smothered and she was left with the pulsing afterthought of burned flesh.
By the time she stopped weeping his footsteps were long departed, and she accepted the granite reality on which her life rested.
Escape or die.
She sucked in two slow breaths, inflating her lungs, imagining oxygenated blood racing into the big muscles of her arms and legs. She exhaled and held the image of her muscles glowing with strength and then, when the image was solid in her mind, she repeated the process, ignoring the tickle in her throat as she let her lungs inflate slowly, demanding that the air flow down into her diaphragm.
Again.
And again.
She felt the vibration of footsteps ascending a nearby staircase and knew she was out of time.
Catherine Edgar fought.
She gritted her teeth and banged against the board over her head, ignoring the hot agony of the nails tearing into her flesh as she slammed her hips down and bucked them up, drumming her heels and digging them in as she tightened the long muscles of her thighs and pressed her knees into the floorboards over her. Her elbows dug in below and she reversed her hands, pressing with the heels of her palms overhead in one long, protracted push that made her dizzy with effort until she felt the impossible.
It gave.
She redoubled her effort, panting and coughing against the sawdust as she snarled.
The surface beneath gave way with shocking suddenness and she fell through the ceiling below in a rain of plaster dust.
It could only have been moments, but Cat awoke to a body screaming in pain. She sat up amidst great shards of plaster and fell back with a moan as pain gripped her like a vice.
But dregs of her fury still burned and she pushed herself up with her unbroken arm, grabbing hold of a wooden chair and staggering upright, only to see herself in the mirrored wall of her own dining room, her naked body coated with white dust and streaked with dark blood. A winter demon with howling eyes.
She lurched on stiff knees from her living room, uncertain and uncaring of how she had arrived in her own home.
Bloody feet made sucking sounds as she staggered across the tiled floor of her kitchen, stepping into the sticky remains of the orange juice she had dropped when she read the note from Lewis.
HEADBAND.
When had that been?
Who had she been when she read that note?
She banged into the kitchen counter and braced her good arm. Like a bargeman poling across a marsh, she moved sideways until she reached the wooden knife block and pulled free eight inches of gleaming, razor-sharp steel.
The staircase creaked, familiar house sounds fraught with menace. She grunted in pain and defiance as she limped towards the door leading from her kitchen onto her back deck. From the deck she would push straight through the line of shrubs that separated their house from the Cavanaugh’s backyard. Glad, so glad that she had not yet prevailed upon Lewis to install the wooden fence that she wanted to keep their neighbor’s Labrador from using her yard as a bathroom.
Her breath fogged across the glass panes and she felt her skin crawl with goosebumps. Nipples tightening at the sudden chill, she clamped the knife blade between her teeth. She tugged at the doorknob until she remembered the deadbolt. Leaned against the door as she ran her hand up the wood until she felt the cold metal and struggled with numb fingers to work it free.
The quality of the air shifted.
Her name whispered.
Leaning against the wood she turned her head to the side, straining her eyes to see the white moon of a face floating towards her from the shadowy womb of the hallway. Pale birds fluttered on either side of the featureless oval until she realized they were hands, raised as if conducting a symphony.
Cat turned her body completely, crying out around the steel between her teeth when her broken arm banged against the doorknob. Then her shoulder blades were against the wood and she took the kitchen knife from her mouth.
“What do you want from me?” was what she meant to ask, drawing in her last true breath.
Instead, she screamed, “This is my house!”
She lifted her knife and darkness closed around her.
- 3 -
Gerard closed the front door behind him, trailing clouds of breath as he crunched over to the hanging tree. He glanced up at his niece’s window. Even without much in the way of furniture, h
e had begun to see it as her room, and saw the wavering light of her lantern.
Etienne had been pacing the house and growling, enough so that Hedde had kicked him out of her room.
Tough kid, he thought. Smarter than me.
But he worried about her. Worried that he was out of his depth.
A wind from the northwest dragged a caul of clouds across the face of the moon, and the silver light grayed, the shapes of the Christmas trees spread over the hillside growing diffuse until they were poised like ranks of soldiers preparing to storm the house.
Like Etienne, Gerard was uneasy and unable to sleep, unwilling to put himself down with whiskey as was his custom on such nights.
He adjusted himself on the stump and held the question in his mind, releasing it on his breath. Then he lowered his head and closed his eyes, hoping to hear the ghosts.
Instead he heard a dangerous rumble from the barn and rose, yanking the axe from the stump and banging through the snow until he reached the door. He fumbled the keys from his pocket, cold with only his thermal shirt on, and unfastened the padlock, slipping the chain from the hasp. He jerked the big door to break the ice and slid it aside just enough to slip inside.
“Easy, girl. Easy, Sophie,” he said, baritone carrying into the dark barn as he took in the musky smell of animal and old blood. He pulled a flashlight from its hook near the door and flicked it on, panning it around the interior.
Several sets of eyes blinked into existence and the growl grew louder.
The den was in the rear of the barn, a low, open-faced structure looking like nothing so much as a manger stolen from a nativity scene. Its floor was lined with straw and old blankets, and Sophie had pulled herself to the front, facing Gerard where she lay growling.
The puppies began yipping and squeaking and several charged out to meet him. He set the axe aside and scooped them up, warily approaching the female Shepherd while maintaining a constant, vocal reassurance.
“What is it, girl?” he asked, kneeling several feet away. He held out his hand and she nosed forward, whining. “What is it?”
Mister White: The Novel Page 15
