Reborn ac-4

by F. Paul Wilson

  "She was there to kill Jim!" Jonah cried. "And now she's here to kill Jim's baby!"

  Grace would have given her life then to stop the growing horror she saw in Carol's face.

  Carol's voice was a whisper. "No!"

  "Carol, dear, you've got to know that the child you're carrying is not really Jim's. It's—"

  Carol's hands were over her ears as her voice rose to a scream.

  "No!"

  11

  Bill had watched the awesome fury of the storm with his parents from the family living room. Now that it had dwindled to a drizzle and a distant rumbling, he was on his way. The temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees. Winter was making a last stand against spring. He had the defroster temperature up as high as it would go to keep the windshield clear.

  He had to pass Carol and Jim's old house on his way to Glen Cove Road, and he felt an ache in his chest as he drove by the charred ruins at 124 Collier.

  That got him thinking about Carol and how she was managing, if she was all right.

  But of course she was all right. She was out at the Hanley place with her in-laws.

  Then why did he have this persistent gnawing feeling that she wasn't all right?

  He was approaching Glen Cove Road and was about to turn south when he abruptly pulled the car over to the shoulder by a Citgo station and stopped. The feeling was growing stronger.

  This is silly, he thought.

  He didn't believe in premonitions or clairvoyance or any of that extrasensory nonsense. It not only went against the teachings of the Church, but it went against his personal experience.

  Yet he could not escape the feeling that Carol needed him.

  He put the car in gear, started toward Glen Cove Road again, then braked and pounded on the steering wheel with his fist.

  He could see that he wasn't going to be able to rest easy until he had settled this.

  He pulled into the Citgo station, dug the Hanley mansion's phone number out of his pocket, and dropped a dime. No ring. The operator came on and told him the phone was out of order. Lines were down all over northern Nassau County. The storm, you know.

  Right. The storm. Maybe the mansion had been hit. Maybe it was ablaze right now.

  Damn. He was going to have to take a run out there. Just drive by. He wouldn't stop in. Just make sure everything looked okay, then head for Queens.

  He took the direct route through the harbor area but was slowed by the traffic being detoured away from a fire on Tremont Street. He joined the rubberneckers, straining to see what was burning up the hill. Whatever it was, it looked to be near Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. An awful thought struck him—maybe the burning building was Our Lady. He had said Mass there only this morning.

  He was tempted to park and run uphill to see. If Our Lady was ablaze, maybe he could help Father Rowley. But the sight of the smoke heightened his anxiety about Carol's safety. He gunned the car toward Shore Drive.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when he found the street in front of the mansion wall free of fire trucks and no pall of smoke dirtying the air over the roof.

  But the driveway inside the gate was loaded with cars.

  Something about that didn't sit right with Bill. He did a U-turn down the street and drove by again. Slowly.

  A good half dozen cars in the drive—J. Carroll, both the Stevenses', and others he didn't recognize. Curious, he pulled in by the wall and walked around to the gate. Maybe he could knock on the front door and ask if anyone had seen his sunglasses. Nobody had to know that they were sitting on the dashboard of his car.

  He was halfway up the drive when he heard Carol scream. He began to run.

  12

  Emma was glad to see the pain in that bitch Grace Nevins's face when Carol screamed. That would be the least of her pain if Emma got her hands on her.

  She felt her back teeth grind against one another as the two men seated her in a chair next to Jonah and prepared to bind her. She had never felt rage like this before. It bordered on madness. In fact, she was sure that if she ever got free and got within reach of Grace, she would lose completely her present tenuous grip on sanity. The last vestige of civilization would slough away and she would become some sort of raving, slavering animal.

  Part of her was frightened by the intensity of the murderous feelings and wanted to hide them away, and yet another part hungered to set the savage free.

  She watched Grace as she fumbled with some mealy-mouthed explanations to Carol. And then there was a commotion at the front door, out of Emma's view, a man calling Carol's name. Suddenly Carol's friend, Father Ryan, burst into the parlor.

  "Carol!" he said. "Are you all—" He stopped when he took in the tableau before him. And everyone, including the monk, stared back, frozen by the sight of the priest's Roman collar.

  "Bill, thank God you're here!" Carol cried.

  "I'm Father Ryan," he said as Emma watched his astonished eyes take in Jonah, tied up in a chair, and she about to be. "What in heaven's name is going on here?"

  "How aptly put, Father Jesuit," said the one called Martin. "Because that's just what this is: in Heaven's name."

  "You were here last week!" he said to Martin.

  "That is true."

  "You're all insane!"

  "Please! Please!" said the monk, pushing back his hood as he came forward.

  For some reason, the sight of the gleaming scalp of his tonsure startled Emma. She tried to identify his accent as he stepped up to Father Ryan.

  "Who are you?" the Jesuit said.

  "I am Brother Robert of the Monastery at Aiguebelle," the monk said. "Please, Father, you must leave. You must trust me as a fellow-ordained priest that we are here to do God's work."

  "Since when does God's work involve binding people to chairs?" the young priest said scornfully. "The game's over. Time to clear out. Get out of here now before I call the police! "

  "Man's laws are of no account when doing God's will," Brother Robert said. "Surely you know that, Father."

  "We'll see if the police agree."

  Emma saw Father Ryan turn and make to leave the parlor, but two of the Chosen blocked his way. The priest pushed them aside. He was strong and they had difficulty holding him. One of Emma's guardians left her to help with the priest, leaving only one standing over her, and he was engrossed in watching the struggle.

  And Grace… that bitch Grace Nevins had stepped back from the parlor entrance, bringing her closer to Emma.

  Without hesitation or even conscious thought, Emma launched herself from the chair and lunged at Grace. The pent-up rage broke free and lent her quickness and power. She felt strong, stronger than she had ever felt in her life.

  A high-pitched, feral cry forced itself free as her fingers found the other woman's throat. Grace's shocked, horrified face twisted into view. Her eyes bulged, her mouth worked around a scream, but Emma squeezed harder, increasing the driving pressure of her thumbs on Grace's voice box.

  But others could scream, and scream they did. Emma could hear their high-pitched wails of shock and anger faintly through the roaring deep in her ears.

  She paid them no mind.

  Grace's pudgy hands pawed at her, alternately trying to push her away and pry the constricting fingers free of her throat. Other hands flailed at her, grappled with her, many hands, pulling at her arms, clawing at her face, desperately trying to free Grace from the death grip.

  Emma shrugged them off.

  So strong. The power surging through her was like nothing she had ever experienced before. No one could stop her now. She watched Grace's red, bulging eyes and slowly purpling face and knew that the end was near. New strength poured into her to finish off the fat bitch.

  13

  Carol's mother-in-law was trying to strangle Carol's aunt—the sight held Bill awestruck.

  In the back of his mind was a voice urging him to take Carol and run. He knew it was right, but instead of heeding it he stood there and watched the melee in the cente
r of the museumlike Victorian parlor as the ones who called themselves the Chosen converged upon the pair of struggling female figures and tried to separate them.

  Carol stood next to him, clutching at his right arm, crying out for the two women to "Stop it, stop it, stop it!" And the monk, Brother Robert, hovered off to the left, tense and frozen, a statue in a habit.

  It would have been like a piece of absurdist theater if it were not apparent to all that Grace was dying in Emma's grasp.

  "Get her off Grace!" shouted the monk at last. "She's killing her!"

  Bill was tempted to help, but there were already too many oddly bandaged hands trying to do just that, and accomplishing little more than getting in each other's way.

  As Grace's face darkened toward a dusky gray, the cries from the Chosen became more frantic, more terrified. Suddenly one of their number—the thin one named Martin— darted away from the group and hurried past the spot where Jonah Stevens struggled with the bonds that held him in his chair. He went to the corner and retrieved something that had been leaning against the wall over there.

  Bill didn't realize it was an ax until the man had raised it in the air over the struggling crowd. After a horrified instant's hesitation, he cried out a warning and leapt forward, reaching for the handle. Brother Robert was beside him. He too was clutching at Martin's arm. But they were too late. Before they could get to it, the blade descended in a blurred arc, burying itself in the top of Emma Stevens's head with a sickening crunch of cracking bone.

  Gasps of revulsion, cries of shock and horror mixed with his own, filling the parlor as the crowd fell away like dropped jackstraws. Grace sagged to the floor, gasping and clutching at her throat as Emma reeled and staggered in a circle, her eyes wide, confused, her arms and hands jerking and spasming, the ax blade jutting from her bloodied head, the handle waving in the air over her back like a baton.

  Suddenly she stiffened, and for one awful, endless instant Emma Stevens stood on her toes with her body, arms, and legs steel-rod rigid, her eyes rolled up in their sockets. Then she collapsed. Her body seemed to deflate, sinking to the floor in a flaccid heap, facedown on the carpet.

  Bill wanted to be sick. Carol moaned behind him. Many of the Chosen fell to their knees in prayer. Brother Robert rushed to Emma's side and began to administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction. Martin helped Grace to her feet. She pointed to Emma's body and tried to speak, but no words came.

  "I had to do it," Martin said nervously as he patted Grace's arm with a trembling hand. "She was killing you. It was do that or watch you die. I had to!"

  As Carol clung to him, weeping, Bill glanced over at Jonah Stevens sitting quietly in his chair. His wife had just been murdered before his eyes, yet he showed no more emotion than if someone had swatted a fly.

  Martin pointed to Bill.

  "Tie him up! Quickly! Before something else goes wrong!"

  Bill was too numb with shock to fight off the hands that gripped his arms and pulled him away from Carol. Emma Stevens… dead… murdered with an ax. He had seen death before, people slipping away in beds after he had administered Extreme Unction, and even the violence in Greenwich Village had occurred in the dark, to strangers. He'd never seen anything like this, never violent, bloody murder in the light of day.

  By the time he got a grip on the chaotic swirl of his thoughts and feelings, he was in a chair and coils of rope were snug about him. The monk was still ministering to Emma's body.

  "Why are you here?" he said to Martin.

  "To stop the Antichrist before he is born," Martin said.

  Behind Martin he saw the women close in around Carol, and suddenly it was all horribly clear to him.

  14

  Brother Robert gave a final blessing to the body of the poor unfortunate woman, then rose to his feet and surveyed the scene.

  Father Ryan's shouts of protest mixed with the young woman's screams as she was led out of the parlor and down the hall. Brother Robert wanted to run away but knew he could not. The young woman—his heart cried in response to her anguish—she was an innocent, unaware of what she carried. But there could be no mistake about the icy core of consummate evil he sensed growing within her. It chilled the room like a blast of arctic air, buffeting him like a gale. They had come to the right place.

  He stared at the Jesuit. He had known that forcible restraint might be necessary, but the actual sight of a fellow priest bound to a chair was upsetting. He had a sense that everything was coming apart, that he was losing control of the situation— if, indeed, he had ever been in control.

  He glanced again at the body lying at his feet and felt a gorge rise in his throat.

  "What has happened here?" he cried to the Chosen. "We are not a rabble! We are doing the Lord's work! Killing is not the Lord's work!"

  "You can't get away with this!" Father Ryan shouted.

  "Sure they can," he heard the other man say in a flat, dry voice as he glared across the room at Martin. "They're going to kill us all."

  Brother Robert stared at the one-eyed man. Hatred gushed from him. Here too was evil.

  "Enough of such talk!" Brother Robert said. His voice had a distant sound in his own ears. "No talk of killing. This has been an awful, tragic mistake, and Martin will answer for it—to earthly authorities, and to God!"

  "But I did it for God!"

  Brother Robert was suddenly furious. "How dare you say that! I cannot accept that! I will never accept that!"

  Martin looked at him with woeful eyes, then turned and ran from the house. Brother Robert heard a car engine sputter to life and its tires skid on the wet pavement as it roared away.

  There was silence for a moment. Peace. Order. Everything was under control. He walked to a window and pulled down one of the heavy curtains. Gently he draped it over the dead woman's still form. Then he motioned the Chosen around him.

  "Let us pray that God will guide Grace and give her the strength to do what must be done."

  He began the Our Father while the Jesuit and the other man strained at their ropes. But Brother Robert knew the cords were stout, and the chairs were solid Victorian oak. Neither would give an inch.

  15

  Carol struggled desperately with the stone-faced women who were dragging her toward the kitchen, but they were as determined to hold her as she was to get free, and there were four of them.

  "Please, Aunt Grace!" she cried, sobbing in her helplessness. "Please! Don't do this to me!"

  Grace wouldn't look at her. She walked ahead, carrying a Gristede's grocery bag. Carol could see swollen purple marks on her neck. Her voice when she spoke sounded hoarse and wheezy.

  "It's God's will."

  "But it's my baby! Mine and Jim's! It's all I have left of him! Please don't take that from me!"

  "God's will," Grace said. "Not mine."

  As they entered the kitchen, Grace glanced at the women holding Carol and pointed to the rectangular, paw-footed kitchen table.

  "Put her there."

  Carol screamed and struggled more violently than ever. For a moment she twisted one hand free and flailed at the women, but they soon trapped it again and subdued her. She used up what little of her strength remained to twist and writhe in their grasp as they each took a limb and lifted her into the air.

  Loss of contact with the floor loosed the floodgates of panic and she unashamedly wailed out her fear. She called out to God to save her, to come and tell these maniacs that they weren't doing His will, to strike them dead on the spot for doing this to her.

  The women ignored her. They might as well have been deaf. And Grace—Grace stood at the sink, washing her hands and working at something on the counter that was hidden by her bulk.

  Then Carol felt the tabletop against her back. She lay pinned and helpless while Grace finished at the counter. When Grace turned, her face was a mask, eyes blood-shot, her skin still mottled from the near strangulation. She was holding a wad of gauze in one of her gloved hands.

  "Oh, please, A
unt Grace! Please!"

  Her aunt pressed the gauze over her mouth and nose. It was wet and freezing cold, and the cloyingly sweet smell made her want to gag. The fumes stung her throat. Carol struggled but couldn't shake free for a clean breath.

  Gradually, despite her fiercest efforts, a tingling, seductive lethargy crept up her limbs and claimed her.

  16

  Grace sobbed as she held the chloroform over Carol's nose and mouth.

  I know you'll never forgive me, dear. But someday I hope you'll understand.

  Finally Carol's violent struggles eased. In pairs, first the arms, and then the legs, her limbs went slack. When Grace was satisfied that her niece was unconscious, she removed the gauze and watched a moment to make sure she was still breathing regularly. She didn't want to put her too far under. Too much chloroform risked liver damage, and even respiratory arrest. Grace wanted her to have just enough to block the pain and relax the muscles so that she could do what had to be done.

  "Carol?" she said, looking for a response. There was none. She brushed her fingertip over her niece's eyelashes, but the wink reflex was gone.

  Good. She was under.

  She smoothed the hair back from Carol's perspiring brow and looked into her eyes between the half-open lids.

  "You're going to be all right," she whispered. "You must believe what I am telling you, dear. The Satan-child inside you will be gone, but you're going to be all right."

  She straightened up and turned to the women.

  "Okay," she said. "You can relax now, but don't move out of position."

  She didn't want Carol to come to and roll off the table and hurt herself. She watched the women release Carol's limbs and noticed the blue-red marks where they had gripped her during her struggles. Each bruise was a tiny stab through the walls of her heart.

  She pointed to the two women by Carol's legs.

  "Undress her."

  They hesitated a moment, glancing at each other—Grace sensed that they were as uncomfortable with this nightmare as she.