Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy)

by Lis Wiehl

  He stopped when he realized he was putting his own needs and desires ahead of something of far greater importance. He’d lost focus. This wasn’t about him. He’d forgotten the lesson his father had taught him a long time ago after reading a book called I Am Third. “God comes first,” Arnie had said, “and others come second. You’re third, but I think you’ll find if you take care of the first two, you won’t need to worry too much about yourself.”

  When Tommy stepped back into the kitchen, Ruth was telling Quinn about Amos Kasden and the party the night Julie Leonard was killed.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Tommy said, glancing toward the door of his den, which was still closed.

  “Please do,” Ruth said. “You know these matters far better than I do, and this young man needs to understand everything if he’s going to help us.”

  Dani wanted to climb out the window, get in her car, hit the interstate, stomp on the gas, and drive until she couldn’t drive any longer, and then sleep for a few hours, wake up, and drive some more, and perhaps by the time she reached Alaska, or Mexico, or both, she’d be able to breathe again.

  Stupid, stupid woman! In over your head. Trust your instincts. Why didn’t you know better? You ran away from him in high school—you knew then that this would happen. He’s a player. He was always a player. You should have taken better care of your heart. You should have proceeded with caution. You weren’t ready for this. You made a bad decision. You’re smarter than this. Take it slow—that’s what your better judgment was screaming at you. Why didn’t you listen?

  When will you ever listen?

  She closed her eyes, and for a second she gave in, gave up, gave herself over to the tears. A small cry seemed appropriate. Not a big one. She let it out, then pulled herself together. She took a deep breath, and another, sniffed, and used a tissue from the box on the desk to blow her nose and dry her eyes.

  She rose from the desk to look in the mirror and wipe at her mascara where it had smeared. She blew her nose again and threw the tissue in the wastebasket, regarding herself in the mirror again. Maybe it was wrong to feel this way. Maybe Cassandra Morton was exactly the sort of woman Tommy needed—pretty and shallow and submissive. Maybe he’d be extremely happy with her. It was his decision, not hers, after all. All she could do was take care of herself.

  She returned to the laptop and clicked on the icon to open the one file on the SD card.

  When she did, she saw a long list of names, 662 of them, in alphabetical order, beginning with Abbot, James 1829 and ending with Zachary, William 1927. The earliest date she could find was 1816. The most recent was just a year ago. When she found Bauer, Udo 1977, she was certain she was looking at a list of boys who’d graduated from St. Adrian’s Academy.

  Bauer’s was the only name she recognized, so she randomly picked names and Googled them, searching for—she didn’t know for what. She skipped names that were too generic, like Smith, Martin 1901 or Jones, David 1958 and concentrated on those that were less likely to produce multiple search hits. She read a few results and saw nothing of interest. She was about to give up when the results popped up for Druitt, William H. 1863. He was, according to Google, an English barrister and the assistant headmaster of a school in Blackheath, England; but more intriguing, he was the older brother of Montague John Druitt, the man Scotland Yard inspectors at the time suspected of being Jack the Ripper. Montague J. Druitt was murdered and his body found floating in the Thames in 1888. William had said his younger brother was “profoundly insane” and acknowledged that he’d found a woman’s arm in his brother’s possession, a limb that may have matched a dismembered body found in Whitechapel, but, William said, he’d thrown the arm away. No conclusive proof was ever found to connect Montague Druitt to the crimes.

  Dani tried another name: von Königsberg, Karl Francis 1842. He’d been a German educational reformer and a friend of Friedrich Fröebel, the man credited with inventing kindergarten. Karl Francis von Königsberg’s perverse claim to fame, however, was that he’d been a teacher in a school in Fischlham, Germany, where he’d given a picture book on the Franco-Prussian War to a seven-year-old boy named Adolf Schicklgruber, who later changed his name to Adolf Hitler. It was said that the boy became fixated on warfare because of that book.

  She tried other names on the list. Before the existence of the nearlimitless capacities of Google’s Booleian engines, it would have been impossible to perform the kinds of searches she was now executing, but the more she looked, the more she discovered about the names on the list. They were not the names of famous mass murderers or serial killers, but they were the names of the babysitters, the next-door neighbors, and the childhood tormentors of mass murderers and serial killers—the accomplices and abettors, provocateurs and progenitors and behind-the-scenes agents.

  Her heart pounded. She tried one more name: Gitchell, Albert 1917. His biography said that after attending “a private school in New York,” Gitchell had gone home to Haskell County, Kansas, to enlist in the army. He’d reported to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he’d worked as a company cook, preparing food for thousands of soldiers on their way to the Western Front. On March 4, 1918, Gitchell reported in sick with the flu. Within days, 552 other men at the camp were stricken. Thousands of other soldiers from Fort Riley had already deployed. Gitchell was believed to have been the source of the 1918 Flu Pandemic that killed perhaps as many as a hundred million people before it was contained, many of them strong young adults who were overwhelmed with what the doctors were calling a “cytokine storm,” killed by their own immune systems overreacting to the virus.

  Not every name Dani checked came with some gruesome connection, but she believed each name would if she had enough time to put the pieces of the puzzle together. She understood now, with a horrible certainty, that St. Adrian’s was the source of this litany of evil. And then she contemplated the long list of boys who’d graduated in the last twenty years, the St. Adrian’s graduates who had yet to “distinguish” themselves as their predecessors had. They were out there somewhere, waiting to spread death and mayhem.

  And Udo Bauer was one of them. She thought of that horrific painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and of the enlargement Julian Villanegre had focused on in the lower right-hand corner of the center panel: a man was emerging from a cave, but next to him, hidden and barely visible, a second man was whispering in his ear. He was like St. Adrian’s Academy, influencing history without appearing at the forefront of it. Evil once removed.

  23.

  “You have failed us.”

  Carl Thorstein knelt on the floor at Headmaster John Adams Wharton’s feet, in the library adjacent to his office. The demon inside him had relaxed its grip enough to let Carl respond to the questions Wharton and Ghieri put to him, though like a torturer wielding an electric cattle prod, the demon could still inflict pain if Carl resisted or refused to answer. The pain was unbearable, like a heart attack, sharp and internal and anguishing. Worse was the feeling of being utterly alone, like a lone miner trapped miles under the earth by a cave-in, knowing there was no way back, no way to even get an SOS out.

  “You’re telling us nothing we didn’t know already,” the headmaster said sternly.

  “They have a technology—”

  “I have no interest in what technology they have,” Wharton said. “We sent you to bring us information. You can go where we cannot.”

  “I’m trying,” Carl said, pleading.

  “Let me,” Ghieri interrupted, holding back Wharton with his hand. He moved to the chair next to Carl. “Look at me, Carl.”

  Carl, temporarily able to command his body again, turned his head but dared not lift his eyes.

  “Look at me!” Ghieri commanded. “I know what you’re going through. You want it to end. We can end it for you, but you have to find out what we need to know first. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure you do,” Ghieri said. “We need to know where the book is. We need t
o know what they know, and who they’ve told. Can you get us that information?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you, Carl? Or will you forget about us, the way you forgot about Esme and swam to shore to save yourself and let her die?”

  “I didn’t swim—”

  “Shut up!” Ghieri said. “You know you did. Do you want your torment to end, Carl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then get us what we need. Go back. You have one more chance. Ask more questions while they still trust you. Go. Now.”

  Carl stood up and scurried for the door. When he was gone, Wharton moved to the window and watched as Carl sped away on his motorcycle.

  “I shouldn’t have listened to you,” he said to the psychologist. “If we’d destroyed them when we had the chance, it wouldn’t have spread this far.”

  “It is not as bad as you think,” Ghieri said. “Once we start a fracture among them, it will spread and disperse them. We just need to give it time.”

  “You may be right,” Wharton said. “But sometimes a holy fire can spread from a few sparks. My inclination is not to wait.”

  “We might be close to finding the book,” Ghieri said. “That is worth the risk. The old woman had to give it to someone.”

  “She gave it to the son.”

  “We don’t know that. She may have seen the son as another dead end. It would make more sense for her to pass it along to someone younger. It wasn’t in the girl’s house, and if it was, it’s burned to ashes.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I think we should wait one more day,” Ghieri said. “If we still have nothing, we’ll destroy the ones we know about and take our chances.”

  “Agreed,” Wharton said. From the window he caught a brief glimpse of the motorcycle’s taillights as Carl drove through the school’s gates. “I don’t like to wait.”

  “We’ve waited for a thousand years,” Ghieri said. “What’s one more day?”

  24.

  “Where’s Tommy?”

  Dani had come back into the kitchen braced for an awkward conversation, but Tommy wasn’t there.

  “He went to look for Carl,” Ruth said. “He thinks Carl has been acting odd.”

  “I agree,” Dani said.

  “Do you think Carl might . . . do something to himself?”

  “Is that what Tommy’s worried about?”

  “It’s a hard time of year,” Ruth said. “The days are so short, and with the holidays coming . . . Carl’s always had a problem in the fall since he lost his daughter. I believe her birthday was around this time of year.”

  Dani called Tommy’s mobile. She heard it ring in the back hall, where she found Tommy’s barn coat with the phone in its pocket.

  “He forgot his cell,” she said, waving it as she returned to the kitchen. She looked out the window and across the courtyard to the garage, where one door of the six garage bays was open and the light was on inside. She saw that one of his motorcycles was gone, the big black one with the fat tires.

  She struggled for a moment, thinking. What she was about to do was wrong, but she had to know. She turned her back to make sure neither Ruth nor Quinn could see her, then scrolled through Tommy’s phone, checking his voice mail. There were no messages from Cassandra, but her name and phone number were on Tommy’s contact list. She checked his call log and saw that he’d called her the night before, at 1:22. Finally, she checked his text records and found the message he’d sent Cassandra: YOU’VE GOT A HOME IN ME.

  She put the phone back in the pocket of his barn coat when she heard someone behind her.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Quinn said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you hungry?” Ruth said. “I made soup.”

  “It’s really good,” Quinn said.

  “No thanks,” Dani said. “I’m not hungry. They told you what’s going on?”

  “They did.”

  “So? Do you think we’re all nuts?”

  “I might have, a year ago,” he said.

  “But not now?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve been opening my mind to many things lately. And given the facts before you, I think you’ve reached the proper conclusions.”

  “You believe in angels?” she said. “You think God has given us a task to complete?”

  “I do.”

  She was relieved but puzzled by Quinn’s easy, well, conversion. She’d anticipated resistance and had already mapped out her argument to convince him that St. Adrian’s was a school teaching and exporting evil. The names on the SD card, and the horrors attached to them, could not be explained any other way.

  “You must be exhausted after being up all night,” Dani said.

  “I am,” Quinn said. “Can I tell you now what I was doing?”

  “Why is it so important for you to tell me what you were doing all night with your girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Quinn said. “For the last time. She’s a colleague, and we were in the lab all night. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I told you I had a job offer with Linz, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, so did Illena. And she accepted. She started a month ago.”

  “And?”

  “And she knows people there.”

  “And?”

  “She stole something. I needed to test a sample of Provivilan. I needed to know that what Linz is about to market as the wonder drug of the next century and a vaccine against depression is not the same Doomsday Molecule we found in that little blue capsule you gave me. Illena shared my concerns. She doesn’t know anything about the school or its test group, but she did the assay and reached the same conclusions I did. And the good news is: it’s not. All the scary side effects we discussed seem to have been addressed. Provivilan, which by the way has already gone out to doctors and clinics as free samples, is missing a couple of the nasty psychoactive components I found in that blue capsule. I don’t see the monoamine transporters conflicting with gonadal steroids the way we predicted with the Doomsday Molecule.”

  “That’s a relief,” Dani said.

  “I agree,” Quinn said. “Maybe the drug you were given was a beta version.”

  “Or something posing as one,” she said. “I don’t think the boys they were giving it to were a test group, and I think the people giving it to them knew all about the scary side effects.”

  “You think they were knowingly dosing students?”

  “Yes,” she said, and pulled out the SD card. “And I’ve got proof that they’ve been doing some version of it for a long time. This list shows—”

  Ruth cut Dani off. “I think Tommy found him!” she said, looking out the kitchen window.

  Dani joined her and saw a pair of motorcycle headlights coming up the drive. She checked the thermal scan on the security monitor to confirm it was two humans, riding two very hot motorcycles.

  Otto began to growl, a deep, ominous rumble from the back of his throat.

  25.

  Tommy had found Carl sitting on his motorcycle by the side of the road near the turn that led to the Gardener farm. Carl told Tommy he needed to think, and he did his best thinking while riding. Tommy said he didn’t need an explanation, but that his friends back at the house were worried about him.

  They parked their bikes in the garage bay closest to the house and closed the door behind them. Tommy wore a down vest beneath his leathers and a fleece face shield beneath his helmet, but he was still cold to the bone from the icy wind. When he used his handheld infrared scanner to check the courtyard, he saw that Carl, who was walking ahead of him, registered several degrees colder than normal.

  “You need to get inside and warm up,” Tommy said, worried for his friend. He turned off the scanner to save the batteries. “It’s too cold for you to be riding without more protection.”

  “You’re probably right,” Carl said, though he seemed unaffe
cted by the chill.

  “Has anybody seen my phone?” Tommy said once he was inside, taking off his coat and hanging it on a hook. “I tried to call you, but I couldn’t find it.”

  “It’s in your barn coat,” Dani said.

  She seemed oddly unemotional, Tommy thought, or maybe indifferent. He’d hoped for a sign that she was glad to see him.

  “Quinn, this is my friend Carl Thorstein,” Tommy said. “He’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Your hand is freezing,” Quinn said as he shook Carl’s hand.

  “I left my warmer gloves at home,” Carl said. He turned and walked to the sink, where he held his hands under hot water as Tommy checked his security monitors, visual and infrared.

  “I want to show you something,” Dani told the others. “But I need the computer in the study.”

  “You can use this one,” Tommy said. He brought the laptop and the wireless mouse over and set them up on the food island in front of Dani. She did not say thank you or even look at him. She plugged the SD card into the laptop and waited.

  “This is the file I found on the SD card mailed to my office,” she said. “We have someone inside St. Adrian’s helping us.”

  “A student?” Carl said. “Do you know his name?”

  “I don’t,” Dani said.

  “How do you know he’s giving you reliable information?” Carl said. “It could be disinformation meant to lead you away from the truth.”

  Tommy noticed that Carl had said you, not us.

  “I thought of that,” Dani said, “but usually when someone is lying”— she looked briefly at Tommy—“they tend to check in to see if you believe the lie. It’s hard to lie and just trust that the lie is going to work. We interrogate people who are lying at the police station or the DA’s office and we know they’re lying when they start asking us questions because they want to know how much we know. They’d probably get away with it if they could just shut up, but they never do.”