Vincent grabbed her shoulder and roughly pushed her aside, but she bounced back into place. Now Jason was up from his chair, saying “Mom? Dad? Mom?” As if single-word queries were all he could muster.
Tim glanced again at the doorway. A couple steps.
“Go, Mr. Brentwood,” Sandy Applegate ordered in a firm, controlled manner.
“You bitch,” her husband roared. “You get out of my way or I’ll—”
“No you won’t,” she said calmly. “You’re not that far gone, honey.” She raised her voice slightly. “Go now, Mr. Brentwood. Don’t worry about us. Just go.”
Brave words, but could she back them up? Tim took a step back, thinking about the Melvin Frost family, who must have also felt safe at home. He might have remained indecisive about going or staying if not for Vincent’s long arm reaching around his wife and firing two wild shots that made dust of the stucco wall behind Tim. That made the decision for him.
Both kids shrieked as another round punched the wall, but Tim’s feet had found the entry hall stone by then and his hands rediscovered the front doorknob.
He was sorry for daylight savings time. He felt like too much of a target out here in the dusky light. He prepared himself as well as he could for the sound of three more shots and the knowledge that his fleeing had doomed an innocent family.
The shots never came. What he heard next was nearly as bad—the clatter of quick footsteps on the porch as someone came out the door behind him. Tim pistoned his arms and flat-out ran, spine prickling where the bullet would enter. He ran a frantic, fluttery zigzag pattern into the street and onto a neighbor’s lawn.
Someone was throwing rocks, only it proved to be the thwack of lead biting a tree. The bark flew, slapping him in the cheek, the sting giving him new speed.
He raced across another lawn and pole-vaulted a fence. A dog snarled. Tim instinctively shielded his privates, but the big animal was content to keep its distance and bark a warning. He clambered over the back fence and found himself on Broadview, and all at once he knew where he was headed. Sirens wailed, but he ignored them. He had to do this alone. The law had no comprehension of, or authority over, what he had to face.
For the first time, he almost knew what he was going to do next. It felt weird.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Four kicks and he was in.
Once Griffin’s shrieking demons had fully faded, he’d wasted precious time pounding and pulling on the French doors on the balcony. Both sets rattled loosely against their locks, but held.
He’d pressed his face tight against the glass, watching with morbid curiosity as the battle raged almost out of view in the upstairs apartment beyond. He fogged the pane with his frantic puffs and had to keep pulling away to wipe it clean.
What he’d seen was a woman in a burgundy dress standing watch over two people tussling on the floor, the entwined limbs sorting out into some man who looked a little like his mailman, now firmly astride Tim’s Patty. The man—wait, it was his mailman—had his hands around Patty’s throat while it looked like he was being cheered on by the female onlooker.
It felt like Griffin’s chest shrank until it could no longer accommodate his flailing heart. He was running out of time. He stared at the vertical edge shared by two of the doors, raised his foot and kicked it without another thought. Wood splintered and the doors shook, but the lock held. He lashed out again and again, pausing on occasion to monitor the action inside.
The mailman’s arms were rigid, his hands braced against Patty’s throat so that his face was red with effort, hers contorted and purple.
Uttering a sharp curse, Griffin gave it one more adrenaline-fueled kick that popped the lock and carried him in. His momentum got him moving faster than his feet could keep up. The flats of his palms slapped floorboards and he climbed awkwardly back to his feet.
Griffin’s clamorous performance proved anticlimactic for the attention it received. Only the woman in the burgundy dress seemed remotely intrigued, but Griffin couldn’t get a handle on what he was seeing. Her essence flickered like a radio signal in an electrical storm.
Griffin dragged himself closer. He’d climbed a shaky ladder, won a screaming match with demons and broken down a door to get here. It seemed like he should have a plan after all of that, but he had nothing.
“LEAVE US ALONE,” boomed the wavering thing in the burgundy dress, her voice flickering in and out like her essence. He could see movement like agitated maggots below the surface of her face.
He gave the thing a wide berth as he crept behind Patty and her attacker. The burning eyes followed, the demon swiveling its head impossibly to track him.
Doing nothing to attract more wrath, he skirted the scene of the murder in progress, moved toward the kitchen doorway. Stopped by Tim’s stereo, a good eight feet from the action on the floor, just a curious spectator. The demon’s burning gaze fixed him to the spot, made sure he was nothing more.
There soon wouldn’t be much to see. Patty’s body lay slack but for two spasmodically twitching fingers. Her lungs let out an occasional outburst that sounded like a nearly flaccid balloon escaping the grip of a child. Griffin watched helplessly as Patty’s face changed colors from purple to an even more ominous shade of gray.
Griffin forced himself to look away, to redirect his attention to the demon fading in and out of existence. While they studied each other with a sort of detached loathing, Griffin reached down and twisted the volume dial on Tim’s silent stereo. The demon’s brow furrowed.
In an equally loose and casual manner, he punched the power switch and the room exploded with sound.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
He wanted so badly to stop, to give his fiery lungs some respite, but he raced on, trying to ignore the police sirens wailing in the distance. He’d give anything to be able to flag down the nearest cop car, put them on the track of a tall minister with a gun and murder in his eyes. Then just go home—wherever that might be these days.
Tim could now see the church at the top of the street. He weaved around a hand-holding couple strolling down the sidewalk without a care in the world and ran up on the lawn outside.
It was an hour closer to nightfall under the expansive shade tree, the temperature ten degrees cooler than elsewhere. Tim squatted, gasped for breath.
Vincent Applegate was coming. Tim hadn’t the slightest doubt of that. The church would act as a sort of magnet, drawing him to its walls if it knew that those walls were threatened.
And it knew.
Tim had a minute, maybe two, to do whatever it was he was going to do. He forced his legs to carry him up the concrete steps to the church’s front door.
“Shit.”
The door that had twice admitted him in the middle of the night was now locked.
It knew, all right.
He glanced over his shoulders, mentally cringing at the sound of a bike whizzing past, somewhere beyond the willow.
It took all of his concentration to ignore what might be happening behind him, to study the face of the church and ignore the gun that might at this moment be picking out a soft spot.
The double pane window to the left of the door was large enough to squeeze through, but of course it was locked up tight. Again, he remembered the windows being opened on other evenings, the screens lowered for fresh air. Now it was as sealed up as it would be in January.
He needed something to break through the window, but even nature seemed to be conspiring against him as his eyes swept the lawn. It was a pebble driveway, but he saw nothing weighty enough to punch through glass.
He tore his shirt off, wadded it around a fist and thought, Jesus, what am I doing? Thought it just before he drew his fist back and slammed it into the exterior pane.
It made a loose, crunching sound and the glass turned to jagged lightning bolts of window fracture. Rather anticlimactic compared to the explosion of sound and fury he’d been expecting, but sufficient. He tapped the spider-webbed pane and a large shard cl
unked out of it and fell from view. He tapped at another crack formation and more glass fell away. Now he had enough room to reach the interior pane with his balled-up shirt and punch out more glass. He looked over his shoulder, but saw mostly willow tree branches and a glimpse of lonely sidewalk.
With a little blind groping, he found the locking mechanism on both shattered panes and raised both windows as high as they’d go. Just high enough for him to slither through and fall awkwardly to the floor. At least he was inside.
His hands made desperate contact with light switches against the possibility that he wasn’t alone. His surroundings took on a yellow cast that made him flinch with every echoed snap of dry wood.
Dry wood.
Beyond the general goal of destroying the church, he’d had no real plan. And yet, he found that the concept of fire had been festering in the back of his mind all along. He patted himself down for what he already knew he wouldn’t find. As a nonsmoker, he had no real access to fire. He didn’t want to think about how he’d torch an entire church without matches or lighter.
“Rub two pews together,” he chortled in near hysteria. He had to get hold of himself.
Then a tiny light flickered in the back of his mind, and he made his way to the galley-size kitchen at the end of the vestibule and pushed through its swinging door.
The hulking appliances—two sinks, a double-wide refrigerator and a gas stove—seemed to overpower the small space. They were old. Looked like they weighed a ton apiece. It was through the sleek steel surface of the fridge that he saw the door moving behind him.
His heart must have been healthy. If it didn’t stop at the sight of the seductive blonde in black panties, bra and garter belt, it never would.
“Tiiiimmy, come play with me,” she said in a singsong voice that wasn’t quite there. “Downstaaaaairs.”
Then she was gone, leaving behind only the dream-memory of her lilting whisper and a hint of perfume in the air. Tim shuffled hesitantly to the doorway and peered out. He caught the briefest flash, the creaking movement of another door in the vestibule, this one leading to the basement.
Shaking nearly uncontrollably, he grabbed the door handle and sealed himself in the kitchen. The blonde wasn’t just Griffin’s phantom anymore. She’d become too powerful to be restricted to one damaged psyche.
Tim’s mission took on new urgency. After wasting more valuable moments reading oven and burner dials, he twisted a knob and heard a satisfying pop, followed by the hiss of gas from one of the eight burners. Gas, but no flames.
He stared at the hissing burner, then twisted three more knobs and heard three more sets of hissing valves. Still no flame. No pilot light.
He could remember his ancient grandmother tootling around in the kitchen with her ancient gas range, offering the burners a shaky blue flame from tall wooden matches.
He pawed through the top drawer under the main counter space, and then tore through cupboards and drawers and shelves. He tossed aside napkins, plastic and silver utensils, paper towels, cookbooks, ceramic mugs, batteries, lightbulbs, salt-and-pepper shakers, coffee beans. He found and littered the floor with everything but matches. His disgusted mutterings turned to sharp oaths.
There had to be matches here somewhere if there was no working pilot light.
Where? Had he seen candles on the altar? He crept back into the vestibule as though he hadn’t already made enough noise to wake the dead. From the unseen side of the front entrance at the opposite end of the vestibule came a scraping sound. Metal on wood.
The fear actually relaxed him, loosened his stiff muscles and let him ask and answer the question that mattered most.
Who has access to a key to this place?
Why, Vincent, of course.
The door swung open slowly enough to give Tim time to hide away. It was only his frozen mind that kept his feet planted.
He had time to see the other man’s impassive face, to notice the square gun in one hand rising before Tim ducked into the chapel.
He hunched low and lost himself in shadows amid the hulking wooden pews. There was no exit, only the open passageway through which he could even now see the black shadow of an armed madman in the vestibule.
Making the tiniest possible ball of himself between rows of pews, Tim wondered when the final shot would come.
Chapter Sixty
The station on the dial might have been turned to rock, rap, jazz or classical. It might not have been a station at all, but a selection from Tim’s iPod if it happened to have been docked into the stereo system at the time. It was impossible to tell at the moment. It was a sonic shriek, a Boeing 747 taking off, a 7.0 Richter-scale earthquake, and they were at the epicenter.
One four-foot-high speaker stood directly above the pair writhing on the floor and it was this speaker that blew out first in a thunderous roar of broken sound. The mailman’s hands went from Patty’s throat to his own outraged eardrums. He might have been screaming as he did so—his mouth took the shape—but it got lost in the grainy sound storm.
As the thing in the burgundy dress stretched ten feet in height, it became even less substantial. Its opaque flesh shifted and briefly lost human form altogether. A voice erupted from it like ocean liners colliding, overpowering even the blown speakers.
“THIS SHALL NOT HAPPEN.”
And yet it did, and the demon grew more and more ephemeral.
The mailman had slumped half off of his forgotten victim in his effort to stave off the earsplitting sound, and now Griffin could detect his mindless scream of agony at the paring knife sticking from his leg.
Patty was twisting and turning the blade, but seemed dazed, weakened, as if sleepwalking through the counterattack. Griffin reached down, grabbed an arm and pulled her out from under the collapsing mailman.
The air wheezed from her lungs between coughing jags. Her color gradually returned, her neck bruising in the ghostly image of a man’s hands.
Griffin shut down the stereo. The comparative silence felt thick, marred only by the bleeding mailman’s gasps of shock and pain, and the harsh, almost rhythmic breathing patterns of everyone in the room.
“How ya doing? I’m Griffin.”
She stared at him. “Huh?” Tapped her ear.
“Oh. Sorry about the…” Griffin waved in the general direction of the stereo. “It was the only thing I could think—”
“Get them.”
It was a small, directionless sound which Griffin finally traced to the burgundy haze near the ceiling.
Still moaning pitifully, the mailman folded into himself and wrapped both hands around the handle of the knife sticking from his leg.
Griffin hooked an arm around Patty and pulled her closer to him. She uttered what sounded like an exhausted sigh.
“…going to let them get away…this?” the formless voice said. “…were any kind of man…wouldn’t…’appened.”
Huge tears slipped from the mailman’s tightly clenched eyes. Moaning louder now and leaking blood to the floor, Matthew Porter raised himself to a seated position. He grabbed hold of a curtain with blood-slickened hands and pulled himself painfully to his feet.
“That’s more like it,” said an encouraging voice from the burgundy figure in the corner. The thing had once again achieved human form and wore an inhuman smile.
Chapter Sixty-One
Tim hand’t found any matches in the chapel and now he knew how cockroaches felt when the light went on.
Still hunched low in front of a row of pews, he expected Vincent Applegate to be waiting for a panicked scurry.
He forced himself to wait. And listen.
Vincent cleared his throat, a sound that echoed sharply. “I know my church,” he said. “I know that there’s only one way in, one way out. So why don’t you stop hiding like a mouse and we’ll discuss matters man to man.”
Sounding entirely reasonable for a man with a gun that he’d already fired repeatedly.
The minister’s voice had come from t
he chapel’s entrance He was apparently distrustful of the feeble yellow light thrown from eight sconces, four on each wall, and reluctant to move into the shadowy room until he’d exposed his target.
Tim could guess why.
There were three aisles. Whichever one Vincent took, Tim could take as many steps in the opposite direction up another aisle. By the time the homicidal reverend made it down to where he used to be, Tim would be out the door.
Neither could make the first move. Stalemate.
Tim could only hope that Vincent’s reluctance held. He had his head tucked between his legs, eyes riveted to the floor, ears perked for the slightest sound. For some reason, he’d put the shirt back on that he’d used to smash the window glass, and he could feel tiny shards grinding into his flesh like stray hairs after a barber’s clipping.
He forced himself to raise his head to see a corner point at which the ceiling met two walls, and orient himself. He was squatting stiffly in front of perhaps the fourth pew row from the altar. One narrow side aisle looked to be eight feet away, maybe ten. Vincent, providing he hadn’t stealthily advanced, was at least a dozen pew rows behind him and some eighteen or twenty feet to his right as Tim faced the back of the church. Chances are, he’d come down the center aisle so as to get a good view of the pew rows on both sides.
And now he could hear the chilling sounds of soft footsteps snicking down the polished floor of that main aisle as though to prove Tim’s point.
Vincent was coming, though taking his sweet time about it. Didn’t matter. Tim’s thigh muscles were too locked up to move.
The soft footsteps ended.
Tim shifted slightly, a painful and failed attempt to flex his bent knees. Cold needles raced up his limbs, a sensation he tried ignoring long enough to take a frantic guess at the number of steps Vincent had taken before stopping.
Four? Five? That might put him, say, eight pews away. Or less.
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