by Nora Roberts
Over the next hour, she worked with more passion, more energy than she had felt in weeks. With steel and brass and flame, she began to create her own nightmare image in three dimensions. To create and to exorcise.
She puddled the metal, laying an even bead to fuse mass to mass. Controlling the motion with her shoulder muscles, she gave in to the rhythm. As moment by painstaking moment the form took shape, she felt the emotion of it, the power of it. But her hands did not shake. In her work there was rarely any need to remind herself of patience or caution. It was second nature to her to raise the torch from the work for a few moments when the metal became too hot. Always she watched the color and consistency of the metal, even as that freer part of her, her imagination, swam faster.
Behind her dark-lensed goggles, her eyes were intense, as if she were hypnotized. Sparks showered as she cut and layered and built.
By noon, she had worked for six hours without a rest, and her mind and arms were exhausted. After turning off her tanks, she set her torch aside. There was sweat skating down her back, but she ignored it, staring at the figure she’d created while she stripped off gloves, goggles, skullcap.
Cautiously she circled it, studying it from all sides, all angles. It was three feet in height, coldly black, apparently seamless. It had come from her deepest and most confused fears—an unmistakably human form with a head that was anything but human. The hint of horns, a snarl for a mouth. While the human part seemed to be bent over in supplication, the head was thrown back in triumph.
It gave her a chill to study it. A chill of both fear and pride.
It was good, she thought as she pressed a hand to her mouth. It was really good. For reasons she didn’t understand, she sat on the concrete floor and wept.
Alice Crampton had lived in Emmitsboro all her life. She’d been out of state twice, once for a reckless weekend in Virginia Beach with Marshall Wickers right after he’d joined the navy and once for a week in New Jersey when she’d visited her cousin, Sheila, who had married an optometrist. Other than that, she’d spent nearly every day of her life in the town where she’d been born.
Sometimes she resented it. But mostly, she didn’t think about it. Her dream was to save enough money to move to some big, anonymous city where the customers were strangers who tipped big. For now, she served coffee and country ham sandwiches to people she’d known all her life and who rarely gave her a tip at all.
She was a wide-hipped, full-breasted woman who filled out her pink and white uniform in a way the male clientele appreciated. Some, like Less Gladhill, might leer and gawk, but no one would have tried for a pinch. She went to church every Sunday and guarded the virtue she felt Marshall Wickers had trampled on.
No one had to tell her to keep the counters clean or to laugh at a customer’s jokes. She was a good, conscientious waitress with tireless feet and an unshakable memory. If you ordered your burger rare once, you wouldn’t have to remind her of it on your next visit to Martha’s.
Alice Crampton didn’t think about waitressing as a bridge to another, more sophisticated career. She liked what she did, if she didn’t always like where she did it.
In the reflection of the big coffeepot, she tidied her frizzed blond hair and wondered if she could manage a trip to Betty’s Shop of Beauty the following week.
The order for table four came up, and she hefted her tray, carting it across the diner to the voice of Tammy Wynette.
When Clare walked into Martha’s, the place was hopping, just as she remembered it from hundreds of Saturday afternoons. She could smell the fried onions, the hamburger grease, someone’s florid perfume, and good, hot coffee.
The jukebox was the same one that had been in place more than ten years before. As Wynette entreated womenkind to stand by their men, Clare figured its selections hadn’t changed, either. There was the clatter of flatware and the din of voices no one bothered to lower. Feeling just fine, she took a seat at the counter and opened the plastic menu.
“Yes, ma’am, what can I get you?”
She lowered the menu, then dropped it. “Alice? Alice, it’s Clare.”
Alice’s polite smile opened to a wide O of astonishment. “Clare Kimball! I heard you were back. You look great. Oh, gosh, just great.”
“It’s so good to see you.” Clare was already gripping Alice’s hard, capable hands in hers. “God, we have to talk. I want to know how you are, what you’ve been doing. Everything.”
“I’m fine. And this is it.” She laughed and gave Claire’s hands a squeeze before releasing them. “What can I get you? You want coffee? We don’t have any of that ex-presso stuff they drink in New York.”
“I want a burger with everything, the greasiest fries you can come up with, and a chocolate shake.”
“Your stomach hasn’t changed. Hold on, let me put the order in.” She called it back, picked up another order. “By the time Frank’s finished burning the meat, I can take a break,” she said, then scurried off.
Clare watched her serve, pour coffee, scribble down orders, and ring up bills. Fifteen minutes later, Clare had a plate of food and a well of admiration.
“Christ, you’re really good at this.” She doused her fries with catsup as Alice sat on the stool beside her.
“Well, everybody’s got to be good at something.” Alice smiled, wishing she’d had time to freshen her lipstick and brush her hair. “I saw you on Entertainment Tonight, at that show you had in New York with all those statues. You looked so glamorous.”
Clare gave a snort and licked catsup from her finger. “Yep, that’s me.”
“They said you were the artist of the nineties. That your work was bold and … innovative.”
“They say innovative when they don’t understand it.” She bit into the burger and closed her eyes. “Oh. Yes. Oh, yes. This is truly innovative. God, I bet it’s just loaded with steroids. Martha’s burgers.” She took a second sloppy bite. “I dreamed about Martha’s burgers. And they haven’t changed.”
“Nothing much does around here.”
“I walked up from the house, just to look at everything.” Clare pushed back her choppy bangs. “It probably sounds silly, but I didn’t know how much I’d missed it until I saw it all again. I saw Mr. Roody’s truck outside Clyde’s Tavern, and the azaleas in front of the library. But, Jesus, Alice, you’ve got a video store now, and the pizza parlor delivers. And Bud Hewitt. I swear I saw Bud Hewitt drive by in the sheriff’s car.”
Tickled, Alice laughed. “Maybe a couple things have changed. Bud’s a deputy now. Mitzi Hines—you remember, she was a year ahead of us in school? She married one of the Hawbaker boys, and they opened that video place. Doing real well, too. Got them a brick house off of Sider’s Alley, a new car, and two babies.”
“How about you? How’s your family?”
“Okay. Drive me crazy half the time. Lynette got married and moved up to Williamsport. Pop talks about retiring, but he won’t.”
“How could he? It wouldn’t be Emmitsboro without Doc Crampton.”
“Every winter Mom nags him to move south. But he won’t budge.”
She picked up one of Clare’s fries and slopped it around in the catsup. They had sat like this, they both remembered, countless times in their girlhood, sharing secrets and sorrows and joys. And, of course, doing what girls do best. Talking about boys.
“I guess you know Cam Rafferty’s sheriff now.”
Clare shook her head. “I can’t figure out how he pulled it off.”
“My mom liked to had a fit—so did some of the others who remembered him as hell on wheels. But he had all these commendations, and we were in a fix when Sheriff Parker took off like he did. ’Course now that it’s worked out so well, everybody’s patting themselves on the back.” She gave Clare a knowing grin. “He’s even better-looking than he used to be.”
“I noticed.” Clare frowned a bit as she sucked on her straw. “What about his stepfather?”
“Still gives me the creeps.” Alice gave a
little shiver and helped herself to more fries. “Doesn’t come into town much, and when he does, everybody pretty much leaves him alone. Rumor is he drinks up whatever profit the farm makes and whores around down in Frederick.”
“Cam’s mother still lives with him?”
“She either loves him or is scared shitless.” Alice shrugged. “Cam doesn’t talk about it. He had himself a house built up on Quarry Road, back in the woods. I heard it’s got skylights and a sunken tub.”
“Well, well. What’d he do, rob a bank?”
Alice leaned closer. “Inheritance,” she whispered. “His real daddy’s mother left the works to him. Pissed off his stepfather real good.”
“I’ll bet it did.” Though Clare understood that gossip was served up in Martha’s as regularly as the burgers, she preferred to have hers in a more private setting. “Listen, Alice, what time do you get off?”
“I have the eight to four-thirty shift today.”
“Got a hot date?”
“I haven’t had a hot date since 1989.”
With a chuckle, Clare dug some bills out of her pocket and laid them on the counter. “Why don’t you come by the house later, for pizza and catch-up?”
Alice grinned, noting without embarrassment that Clare had left her a generous tip. “That’s the best offer I’ve had in six months.”
In a corner booth two men sat, drinking coffee, smoking, and watching. One of them cut his eyes over toward Clare and nodded.
“People are talking a lot about Jack Kimball now that his girl’s back in town.”
“People’re always talking about the dead.” But he looked as well, shifting so he could stare without being noticed. “Don’t figure there’s anything to worry about. She was just a kid. She doesn’t remember anything.”
“Then why’s she back?” Gesturing with his smoldering Marlboro, the man leaned forward. He kept his voice low so that k.d. lang crooned over his words. “How come some rich, fancy artist type comes back to a place like this? She’s already talked to Rafferty. Twice, I hear.”
He didn’t want to think about problems. Didn’t want to believe there could be any. Maybe some members of the coven were pulling away from the purity of the rites, getting a little careless, more than a little bloodthirsty. But it was just a phase. A new high priest was what was needed, and though he wasn’t a brave man, he had attended two secret meetings on that particular problem. What was not needed was a flare of panic because Jack Kimball’s daughter was back in town.
“She can’t tell the sheriff what she doesn’t know,” he insisted. He wished to hell he’d never mentioned the fact that Jack had gotten stewed one night and babbled about Clare watching a ritual. In the back of his mind, he was afraid Jack had died as much for that as for the shopping center deal.
“We might just have to find out what she does know.” As he crushed out his cigarette, he studied her. Not a bad looker, he decided. Even if her ass was on the bony side. “We’ll keep an eye on little Clare,” he said and grinned. “We’ll keep an eye right on her.”
Ernie Butts spent most of his time thinking about death. He read about it, dreamed about it, and fantasized about it. He’d come to the conclusion that when a person was finished with life, they were just plain finished. There was no heaven or hell in Ernie Butts’s scheme of things. That made death the ultimate rip-off, and life, with its average seventy-odd years, the only game in town.
He didn’t believe in rules or in doing good deeds. He’d come to admire men like Charles Manson and David Berkowitz. Men who took what they wanted, lived as they chose, and flipped society the finger. Sure, that same society locked them up, but before the bars shut, these men had wielded incredible power. And, as Ernie Butts believed, they continued to wield it.
He was as fascinated by power as he was by death.
He’d read every word written by Anton LaVey, by Lovecraft, and Crowley. He’d pored over books of folklore and witchcraft and Satan worship, taking out of them all that he understood or agreed with and mixing them together into his own messy stew.
It made a lot more sense to him than sitting through life being pious, self-sacrificing, and humble. Or, like his parents, working eighteen frigging hours a day, sweating and scraping to make loan payments.
If all you were going to end up with was six feet of dirt, then it was logical to take whatever you could get, however you could get it, while you were still breathing.
He listened to the music of Motley Crüe, Slayer, and Metallica, twisting the lyrics to suit his needs. The walls of his once airy attic room were lined with posters of his heroes, frozen into tortured screams or smiling evil.
He knew it drove his parents crazy, but at seventeen, Ernie didn’t concern himself overmuch with the people who had created him. He felt little more than contempt for the man and woman who owned and operated Rocco’s Pizza and were forever smelling of garlic and sweat. The fact that he refused to work with them had fostered many family arguments. But he had taken a job at the Amoco, pumping gas. Reaching for independence was what his mother had called it, soothing his baffled and disappointed father. So they let him be.
Sometimes he fantasized about killing them, feeling their blood on his hands, experiencing the punch of their life force shooting from them at the moment of death and into him. And when he dreamed of murder, it frightened and fascinated him.
He was a stringy boy with dark hair and a surly face that excited a number of the high school girls. He dabbled in sex in the cab of his secondhand Toyota pickup but found most of his female contemporaries too stupid, too timid, or too boring. In the five years he’d lived in Emmitsboro, he’d made no close friends, male or female. There wasn’t one with whom he could discuss the psychology of the sociopath, the meaning of the Necronomicon, or the symbolism of ancient rites.
Ernie thought of himself as an outsider, not a bad thing in his estimation. He kept his grades up because it was easy for him, and he took a great deal of pride in his mind. But he rejected outside activities like sports and dances that might have forged some bonds between him and the other kids in town.
He contented himself toying with the black candles and pentagrams and goat’s blood he kept locked in his desk drawer. While his parents slept in their cozy bed, he worshipped deities they would never understand.
And he watched the town from his aerielike perch atop the house, focusing his high-powered telescope. He saw a great deal.
His house stood diagonally across from the Kimball place. He’d seen Clare arrive and watched her regularly ever since. He knew the stories. Since she had come back to town they had all been dug up and opened—like an old casket, they breathed out sorrow and death. He’d waited to see when she would go up, when the light in the Kimball attic would go on. But she had yet to explore that room.
He wasn’t very disappointed. For now, he could home his lens in on her bedroom window. He’d already watched her dress, pulling a shirt down her long, lean torso, hitching jeans over her narrow hips. Her body was very slender and very white, the triangle between her legs as red and glossy as the hair on her head. He imagined himself creeping through her back door, quietly climbing her steps. He would clamp a hand over her mouth before she screamed. Then he would tie her down, and while she writhed and bucked helplessly, he would do things to her—things that would make her sweat and strain and groan.
When he was done, she would beg him to come back.
It would be great, he thought, really great, to rape a woman in a house where someone had died violently.
Ernie heard the truck clatter down the street. He recognized Bob Meese’s Ford from Yesterday’s Treasures in town. The truck lumbered up the Kimball drive, belching carbon monoxide. He saw Clare jump out, and though he couldn’t hear, he could see she was laughing and talking excitedly as the portly Meese heaved himself down from the cab.
“I appreciate this, Bob, really.”
“No problemo.” He figured it was the least he could do for old time
s’ sake—even though he’d only dated Clare once. On the night her father died. In any case, when a customer plunked down fifteen hundred without haggling, he was more than willing to deliver the merchandise. “I’ll give you a hand with the stuff.” He hitched up his sagging belt, then hauled a drop leaf table out of the truck bed. “This is a nice piece. With some refinishing, you’ll have a gem.”
“I like it the way it is.” It was scarred and stained and had plenty of character. Clare muscled out a ladder-back chair with a frayed rush seat. There was a matching one still on the truck, along with an iron standing lamp with a fringed shade, a rug in a faded floral pattern, and a sofa.
They carried the light loads inside, then wrestled the rug between them, chatting as they worked about old friends, new events. Bob was already panting when they walked back to the truck to study the curvy red brocade sofa.
“This is great. I’m crazy about the swans carved in the armrests.”
“Weighs a ton,” Bob said. He started to hoist himself up on the bed when he spotted Ernie loitering on the curb across the street. “Hey, Ernie Butts, what you doing?”
Ernie’s sulky mouth turned down. His hands dove into his pockets. “Nothing.”
“Well, get your ass over here and do something. Kid’s creepy,” Bob muttered to Clare, “but he’s got a young back.”
“Hi.” Clare offered Ernie a sympathetic smile when he sauntered over. “I’m Clare.”
“Yeah.” He could smell her hair, fresh, clean with sexy undertones.
“Get on up there and help me haul this thing.” Bob jerked his head toward the sofa.
“I’ll help.” Agile, Clare jumped up in the back beside Ernie.
“Don’t need to.” Before she could get a grip, Ernie had lifted the end of the sofa. She saw the muscles in his thin arms bunch. She immediately pictured them sculpted in dark oak. As they swung the sofa down, Bob grunting and swearing, she scrambled out of the way. Ernie walked backward, up the drive, over the walkway, through the door, his eyes on his own feet.
