by Lis Wiehl
“I didn’t name mine,” he said.
Ghieri found the appropriate box. “It will be more believable if you give your pets names. Andrew, you are to say your pet’s name was . . . Bugs,” he read.
The other boys laughed.
“You will not open your boxes until it’s time to dump the ashes in the water,” Wharton said. “You will not ask any questions about your assignment, and you will not fail to complete it. You understand what will happen if you fail.”
The laughter gave way to a reverberating silence.
“Put your blindfolds back on,” Wharton commanded.
When they were alone, Wharton spoke to Ghieri. “The priest,” he said. “The minister, whatever he is—do we still have use for him?”
“He’s found the book,” Ghieri said. “That is significant. It’s been a long time since we even knew where it was.”
“Yes, but can he get it?”
“He thinks he can.”
“He thinks he can?”
“He should be given the chance to try.”
“No,” Wharton said decisively. “The priest has had enough time. What’s the name the Indian has given him?”
“Thadodaho,” Ghieri said.
“Oh yes,” Wharton said. “Well, he’s failed. I see no reason not to send the other.”
“The Wendigo,” Ghieri said.
“Yes,” Wharton said. “Use him. Wait until after dark. We can sort through the rubbish when he’s finished.”
“I think—”
“Do not think,” Wharton said.
“Yes.”
“And blow out the candles.”
“Yes,” Ghieri said.
35.
“Do you know where you are?”
George Gardener looked confused. When Dani shone a small flashlight in his eyes, his pupils dilated normally, indicating, though not conclusively, that he probably wasn’t under the influence of any drugs. He sat in Tommy’s kitchen, a comforter wrapped around his shoulders. The others gathered around him, though Dani had advised them to stay back and give the frightened man time to adjust to their presence.
“George—do you know where you are?” she said again.
“No.”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me what month it is?”
“November.”
“Do you remember Tommy? You met him in the hardware store a few weeks ago. He had a question about how to stop raccoons from getting in the garbage.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to be scared, George,” Dani said. “You’re among friends, and we have the book. When was the last time you slept, George?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t remember?”
“Can’t sleep,” he said. “They come to take you when you’re sleeping.”
“Have you slept at all since your mother died?”
“I killed her,” he said.
“You killed your mother?”
“No.”
“Then who did you kill, George?”
“The girl. I killed the girl.”
“What girl?”
“Julie.”
“No, George. A boy named Amos Kasden killed Julie.”
“I killed her,” he said, suddenly focused and angry. “I went to her house. My mother . . . I thought it was time. I couldn’t tell. I went to her house. They must have followed me. That’s how they knew.”
“George, you couldn’t have known—”
“They burned down the house,” he said. “They burned it down! With her mother and her sister in it. Because of me. I killed them all.” He started sobbing.
Dani pulled a chair up next to him and held him, pressing his head against her shoulder and stroking his back. Ruth moved her chair to the other side of him, ready to take over when Dani got tired.
After a few minutes George stopped crying. Dani stood and crossed to where Tommy and Quinn stood.
“I don’t think he’s slept in a week,” she said. “People who go without sleep that long start dreaming while they’re wide awake. I don’t think we’re going to get much out of him until he’s had a chance to recover.”
She opened Tommy’s refrigerator, searched for a moment, and pulled out a container of vanilla yogurt, a bottle of ranch dressing, and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. She mixed those ingredients in a cup, along with some ground ginger from Tommy’s spice cupboard. She tasted it, winced, stirred in a big spoonful of brown sugar, then took the concoction and a tablespoon from the cutlery drawer to where George was sitting.
“This medicine is going to let you sleep,” she told him. “You’re safe now, George. We’re going to watch over you, so take this and sleep.”
She gave him one tablespoon of her “medicine,” then another. Carl offered to escort George to one of the guestrooms, but Ruth said she wouldn’t mind doing it.
“Where did you learn to make a home remedy sleeping potion?” Tommy asked.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I gave him a placebo. I just wanted to make sure it didn’t taste like anything he’d ever had before. If he thinks it’s going to work, it will.”
Ruth returned a moment later and gave Dani a thumbs-up.
“Out like a light,” she said.
Ruth and Villanegre spent the day researching names. Quinn and Dani worked on the computer, testing theories about the drug. Ben taught Cassandra to play chess. Tommy tried to talk to Carl, but Carl didn’t want to talk and kept to himself.
“Tommy,” Carl said finally, “would you mind getting the book out of the safe and setting it up for me on the coffee table? I’d like to have a look at some of the earlier letters from Abbie’s predecessors. Might be able to learn something.”
“Good idea,” Tommy said. “Do you want the combination?”
“No, no, that’s okay,” he said. “If you could just set it up for me. And put the blanket down so it doesn’t get scratched.”
“All right,” Tommy said. “Just give me a second.”
Dani leaned against the kitchen counter near the sink, talking to Julian Villanegre about the painting. Looking past them out the window, Tommy saw that the sun was already going down, leaving behind a blood-red sunset.
“Dani—I’m going to need your help in a second,” he said. “Carl wants to look at the book, but I can’t open the box without you.”
“Okay,” she said.
Once he left the room, she saw the Englishman raise an eyebrow.
“I gather there’s some sort of lovers’ quarrel going on between you two,” he said. “Can I help?”
“We’ll work it out,” Dani said. “The course of true love never did run smooth. Isn’t that what your boy Shakespeare once said?”
“Lysander, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 1, scene 1,” Villanegre said. “Poor Lysander. He loved Hermia, but Hermia’s father wanted her to marry Demetrius. Shakespeare wrote a great deal about lovers who were preordained, and all the obstacles they had to overcome.”
“Do you believe in soul mates, Dr. Villanegre?”
“I do. I lost mine years ago, but I shall see her again soon enough. If you don’t mind an old man’s interference, I think there’s another Shakespeare quote you might want to heed.”
“Please.”
“Beware the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”
“Othello,” Dani said.
“Indeed. But the irony, of course, is that Iago is the one who says it to Othello, right after Othello compliments him on being so honest. And Iago’s the one who’s been whispering in Othello’s ear to make him jealous. It’s as if he’s saying, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do to you, and you know it, and I know it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’”
“You think that’s relevant now?”
“I think it’s odd,” the Englishman said, “that both your old flame and Tommy’s old flame are here. Don’t you?”
“Everything happens for a reason, I suppose,” Villanegre said. “But if this lovers’ quarrel you’re having has anything to do with jealousy, just remember how easily the joy of having something can turn into the fear of losing it.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I have a question—why did the box open when Tommy and I touched it?”
“I think you know the answer,” Villanegre said. “Ben read it to us. ‘You, the holder of this sacred text, the keeper of these words, whose hands have broken this lock, you hold the secret, and you are charged by the fact of possession with a holy task.’ You’ve been chosen.”
“But we weren’t intended to hold the book,” Dani said. “Julie Leonard’s father was.”
“And after that?” Villanegre said. “You don’t think God would have left it all to chance, do you? I will tell you one thing. The fact that you can put your hands on the box together certainly proves one thing—you’re not demons in human form. We have learned over the centuries that demons are incapable of making contact with sacred objects or icons. Because it shames them, I suppose. Tells them how fallen their stature is. That’s why so many of the figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights are chimerical hybrids. The intended viewers would have been unable to look at a conventional rendering.”
“The statue of St. Adrian’s in the museum atrium,” Dani said. “Tommy noticed he wasn’t wearing a cross. He thought that was odd. He thought a cross would have made the St. Adrian’s student body uncomfortable. To say the least.”
“You know, at Oxford, when we teach art history, we give students a slide or a print of a painting and we say, ‘Tell me what you see.’ In America it’s the reverse; you sit in a big dark auditorium and a slide of a famous painting comes up and the instructor tells you what he sees. And what you ought to see. And half the students are so bored that by the third slide, they’re sound asleep. I’ve had a number of American graduate students who are very book-smart and can regurgitate what their professors told them word for word. But Tommy has the other kind of intelligence. He can look at something and see it. And that kind of intelligence is rare. You may want to compliment him on it. I think he feels just a bit intimidated by Quinn.”
Villanegre smiled, then turned to Ruth, who offered him the last of the strawberry-rhubarb pie.
In the study, Tommy picked up the box and held it toward Dani. Together they pressed on the cross inlays in the correct sequence, and once again the box slid open.
“Pretty cool how it does that,” Tommy said. “Did you worry at all that this was going to be some kind of Pandora’s box? That once we opened it, we’d wish we hadn’t?”
“No,” she said. She grabbed his hand and held on to it. “Tommy—we have to talk.”
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Those are four words no man likes to hear.”
“It’s not one of those talks,” Dani said.
“You want to talk?” he said.
She nodded.
“Then we can talk.”
“The angel told us both, ‘How you handle it is going to make all the difference,’ right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I have not handled this well,” she said. “The problem from the very start is that we’ve stopped really communicating with each other. I should have come straight to you as soon as I started feeling the least bit jealous.”
“I agree with you about communication,” he said.
“Honesty is what matters,” Dani said. “So if you tell me you sent Cassandra that text because you were feeling insecure, or because you wanted to fight fire with fire, or even that you were thinking you could fix her up with Quinn—whatever—I don’t care . . . just as long as you don’t try to tell me you didn’t send it. Just tell me what happened.”
He looked her in the eye for a moment. “I didn’t send it.”
Dani turned and stormed out of the room.
Tommy followed, passing Carl in the doorway on his way out.
“Is it okay if I look at the book?” Carl said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tommy said. “It’s all set up for you. Knock yourself out.”
Carl closed the door behind him.
Tommy caught up to Dani in the living room, where he grabbed her hand. She shook it loose.
“Dani—”
“You really need to stop talking right now,” she said.
“Dani, we just agreed that not talking was the wrong way to handle things. Talking is the way to handle things. We just said that, right?”
She looked at him, feeling hurt and a little ashamed for being so gullible, but she didn’t say anything.
“Just listen,” Tommy said. “Dani, I checked with Ben. I’m not denying that there’s a record of the text message on my phone, okay? And I’m not denying that Cassandra received it. But I was sound asleep when it happened. I can’t prove that, but it’s the truth. Ben said a demon could only send a text message if he took on some sort of physical form, and that didn’t happen, because when I went to bed, I left my phone on the food island to recharge, right in the middle of a completely lit kitchen. If any demon materialized in the kitchen, Carl would have seen it, because he was on watch.”
Both Tommy and Dani realized what he’d said as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“Carl!” Dani said.
Tommy ran from the room and burst through the door of his study, Dani right behind him. They rushed into the room. On the floor next to the coffee table, Tommy saw the wooden box. It was empty.
He looked around. The window facing the front yard was open, and the screen had been punched out. The book, and the blanket it had been resting on, were gone. As was Carl.
36.
Tommy ran into the kitchen.
“Has anyone seen Carl?”
They heard an unmistakable, deep-throated growl, the roar of Carl’s motorcycle. Through the kitchen window he saw Carl speed away, heading for the front gate.
Tommy ran to his kitchen computer and punched up his security screen. He saw Carl fishtailing down the driveway and clicked to the camera covering his gate. The gate was open. When he tried to close it, the program asked him if he was the system administrator. He clicked yes, and the computer asked him for the password. When he typed it in, the computer told him it was the wrong password. He tried one more time, carefully, but got the same response.
“Carl changed the password,” Tommy said.
He reached for the hook where he kept his keys and grabbed his leather jacket. Before he could put it on, Dani stopped him, kissed him quickly, and handed him his .45 caliber Taurus automatic. They both knew Carl was not Carl anymore, and that the book could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
Tommy ran to the garage and threw open the last bay door. He put the key in the ignition of his Harley-Davidson Night Rod, squeezed the clutch with his left hand, and said a little prayer as he pressed the ignition. The bike roared to life on the first try. He throttled up once, throttled down and let the clutch out, leaning hard to the right as he screeched out of the garage, already in third gear by the time he was on the straightaway leading to the gates.
Once he was on the street, he whipped his head left and right, left and then right again, looking for a taillight. Had Carl gone north, toward the countryside, or south, toward town? He saw a single red taillight cresting a far hill, jerked his bike to the right, and hit the gas. He had a fair idea of where Carl was headed.
Tommy had driven this road many times, and driven it too fast too many times. He held the throttle full back and toed the bike into its highest gear, downshifting into the curves but leaning so far into the turns that his knee was a foot off the black asphalt. The Michelin “Scorcher” tires were as fat as an automobile’s, built for racing, as was the 1250-cubic-centimeter liquid-cooled V-twin engine that kicked out 122 horsepower, capable of flinging the 900 pounds of bike and rider down the road at 150 miles an hour. At the first hill, Tommy’
s bike sailed two feet above the ground before landing rear tire first on the downslope.
Tommy knew he was a better rider than Carl. They’d even joked about it, and they’d had a few races on empty back-country roads where there was no traffic and the possibility of endangering other drivers was negligible.
Tommy had never tried too hard to understand why, but the simple fact was that he was good at every sport he’d ever tried. He could pick up a bowling ball, roll a gutter ball his first ball, knock down nine on his second, and end up rolling a 284 the first time he tried bowling. He’d been a three-sport All-American in high school, but had dropped basketball in college to concentrate on football and baseball. Even so, in addition to being a first-round draft pick in the NFL and heavily recruited by a half dozen professional baseball teams, he’d also been a third-round pick by the Boston Celtics. His physical gifts, which he could only think of as God-given, extended to the operation of mechanical devices and motor vehicles. Skateboarding and snowboarding came naturally to him, as did mountain biking and motocross. There were faster motorcycles in the world, but there wasn’t a faster motorcycle in Westchester County that night, and there wasn’t a better rider.
Tommy knew he was going to catch the older rider. And Carl knew it too.
Carl had snatched the book off the coffee table by wrapping it in the blanket and carrying it in a sling. He was unable to touch the book—or rather the beast inside of him, the one controlling him, could not touch it—but he managed to get it out the window and into the touring bag strapped to the sissy bar above his rear fender. He’d sped off on his motorcycle thinking only that he had to deliver the book to the school, where Wharton or Ghieri would know what to do with it. Then he’d be free of the demon inside him.
Yet as he rode, he felt something return to him, a kind of control or autonomy that had been absent since the demon had entered him. He could tell the bike where to go and how fast, and the faster he went, the more in control he felt. Before, when his thoughts troubled him and he needed to rebalance, Carl had discovered that with the wind in his face and the rumble of the road and the thundering machine beneath him, he could enter a kind of consciousness some might have called contemplative or meditative; he knew it as a state of constant prayer, a kind of worship in motion that at times approached religious ecstasy. It wasn’t that riding relaxed him, which was what he told people, but more that with his body fully engaged in the operation of the machine, his mind was free to engage in the kind of deep prayer other people needed quiet chapels and stainedglass windows to achieve.
