A guttural roar exited his throat, and he lashed out with his other arm, reaching first out to his side, then behind him, trying to grab something, anything, any part of the dozen or so girls that were on top and all around him.
“Let me up!” he shouted.
With mud falling from his chin, he somehow managed to raise his head, and blinked rapidly, clearing the thick substance from his eyelids.
And then he froze.
Kendra was on fire.
“Oh my god,” he whispered. Something hard hit him in the side, but he barely noticed. Even his hand, which was wrapped around a thin wrist and held it tight, was frozen.
Brett could hear the sound of his partner’s skin bubble and pop. Her mouth was wide, her eyes wider, which he caught sight of every time the breeze pushed the flames away from her neck. The rest of her body was hidden, a black mess buried in the roaring fire.
He couldn’t see Lacy.
“No,” he moaned.
As he watched in sheer horror, there was a loud fizzle, and Kendra’s black hair went up in an instant, the air immediately filling with a disgusting smell.
Brett was suddenly invigorated, filled with a need to save what was left of his partner. Nobody deserved to go out like this.
He grunted and yanked with the arm behind his back, throwing one of the smaller girls at least three feet from him, where she landed in the mud with a grunt of her own.
Someone bit his ankle, and he punched her in the face with his other hand. He heard a crunch and his knuckles were instantly bathed in something wet. He started to kick next, moving his feet back and forth rhythmically, oblivious to the cries as his boots hit bone, skin, and hair.
Two more swipes and another roar, and Brett felt the pressure on his back ease again.
“Get the fuck off me!” he screamed, and then, straining with everything he had, he brought his right arm under him. Somehow, he managed to push himself to a knee.
Another few violent shakes and he had gone from the brink of death to being on all fours.
A snapping sound, like a guy-wire being pulled too tight, drew his gaze back to the fire.
“Kendra,” he moaned, seeing his once lover fall from the tree, the ropes around her neck and chest alight like burning snakes.
Her body tumbled forward, and she landed in front of the fire. Now clear of the crackling flames, Brett got a good look at the true extent of the damage.
It was horrific. Kendra’s body was as blackened as the figure on the grass, the one that she had called Mother.
Mater est, matrem omnium.
The demon.
Her face was a mess, her cheeks covered in huge blisters and welts.
Her lips had melted away, and her eyelids were completely gone. She was nearly bald, with only thin strings of hair clinging to her black and red scalp. Her breasts, once so full and round, were now oblong-shaped, charred, horrible.
Brett lashed out with his arm, tossing another child from him. They too appeared to be distracted by the sight of Kendra’s burned body.
Somehow he managed to put one foot on the ground.
Kendra was gasping, a grotesque, wheezy sound, and then blood and gore spilled from her mouth.
And then he noticed a shadow moving behind her. Something in the woods was re-emerging.
Martin. It’s that fucker Martin.
“No!” Brett screamed, shrugging off another girl and making it to a crouched position.
“Lacy!” The voice was so unexpected that Brett momentarily took his gaze off Kendra. He swiveled, but he was exhausted and uncoordinated, and he fell back to the mud.
“Lacy! Lacy! Oh my God, Lacy!”
CHAPTER 71
Kendra couldn’t see, could barely hear. Her world had been reduced to a burnt black void. Everything was dark, save two fiery letters that had burned themselves into her mind.
BH.
She had saved Lacy—she knew she had. Back before the flames had engulfed her, she had heard Lacy scream and fall away. She even thought she heard the girl’s footsteps make their way toward the woods, but couldn’t be certain.
She was going to die, but she was going to die knowing that she’d done good.
There was only one more thing to do.
Kendra’s body was numb, but somehow she managed to crawl forward, into the darkness, toward where she had last seen her Mother’s burnt body lay.
She was going to finish what Father John had started; she was going to make sure that Lacy and the rest of her sisters were free of her hold forever.
It was what she was destined to do, she realized… all of the pain she had inflicted on herself, all of the times she had cut herself to make her feel, had been building up to this moment. All of those injuries had numbed her just enough so that she could move now, in this moment, toward her ultimate destiny.
She scuffed blindly along the lawn, her hand sweeping across what she thought might be grass or even mud. Her fingertips were so burnt that individual textures didn’t register, only generic sensations, like pressure.
She swept her hands back and forth, trying to swallow, trying to at least wet her throat enough to speak the words that she knew she had to say.
The ones that Father John had started.
The ones that she had heard Father Callahan shout at Christine Barker all those years ago, back when she, like those in the swamp, was but a scared, confused girl.
Kendra’s hand bumped something and she stopped the sweeping motion. She heard a sort of grunt, or an expulsion of air of some sort, and she knew that she had found Mother. The ‘BH’ in her mind grew brighter and brighter.
With both hands, she gripped the form, feeling the crispy skin on her knuckles split and begin to ooze. It didn’t matter.
“Enter me!” she whispered. Her throat was so hoarse and dry that the words barely out. She tried to swallow, but she had no saliva left. “Enter me,” she gasped. “Enter me! Enter me! Enter me!”
Her mangled hands gripped the object and she pulled it up and down, shaking it, throttling it the best her wasted body would allow.
“Enter me!”
Something passed in front of Kendra’s face, and she hesitated. It felt like a strange, thick wind or fog.
And then her head was thrown back and her mouth wide. Something was in her mouth, her throat, her nose, filling her, binding with her very cells and DNA.
Her hands fell to her sides, and then she was sitting on her heels, her body rocking back and forth as the demon filled her.
A vision flashed in front of her blind, oozing eyes, one so real that Kendra thought it a memory.
She was sitting on Mother’s porch, only it was different. The wood beneath her was different, the house smaller, more old-fashioned—like something out of a history book. As she looked around, staring at the trees that were full, their lush green leaves blocking out just enough of the bright sun above to make it bearable, she saw that her blouse had been pulled open, her large breasts exposed. There was a plastic cup, something homemade-looking, with a tube leading to a glass sitting on a small table.
A bullfrog burped. A bird chirped. And she leaned back, slowly rocking as milk was drawn out of her breast and into the glass.
And she smiled.
The image suddenly shifted, and now it was dark, and she was inside the house, a little girl again, crouched, hiding low, trying to peek out the curtain without being seen.
Someone was yelling, shouting, saying horrible things. A flicker of a torch passed a window, then another. The shouting grew louder, and then she screamed when something smashed the pane and bounced across the wooden floor. She covered her ears, and tried to shut her eyes, to force the sounds away, but it wasn’t possible.
Her eyes focused on the object.
It was a ceramic doll; a doll with blonde hair and a blue dress. The pale white face had bright red lips, heart-shaped lips, but the eyes had been torn out.
She screamed again.
CHAPTER 72
The scene that unfolded before Brett made his head spin.
Peter McGuire had arrived, and he had run toward his daughter, Lacy, who was rolling on the ground, trying to put out the fire that devoured her clothes. As he watched, her flames shrunk, then went out completely. But before Peter could make it to his daughter, Lacy was on her feet, her eyes wide, her expression one of sheer confusion. And then she hobbled toward the woods, oblivious to her father that couldn’t quite reach her.
More movement caught his eye.
Kendra, unbelievably, had started to crawl toward Father John and Mother’s bodies.
Clearly blind, she swept her arms around until they fell on Father John’s limp chest. As he watched in terror, unable to move, she grabbed his cloak and started saying something, over and over again, but it was far too quiet for him to hear.
Mother started stirring then, and behind her Martin still lurked in the shadows. The woman’s body, which looked not that different from Kendra’s, rolled onto its back and then its legs began to open.
The horrible black fog started to migrate out and move toward Kendra’s head.
“Get off of him!” someone shouted, and Brett cranked his head around.
Of course.
Peter’s presence made sense when he saw the director stride forward, a gun held out in front of him.
“No!” he shouted, but Director Ames took no notice. Don’t hurt the girls, he wanted to say, but nothing came out.
“Get off him!” the director yelled again.
Martin came out of the woods then, reaching for Mother’s body. Even in the moonlight, Brett could see the sneer on his face.
The desperation.
The putrid cloud surrounded Kendra’s head even as she throttled the priest, clearly thinking that she was gripping Mother. Martin hooked his hands beneath Mother’s arms, and started to drag her body backward, toward the woods.
Director Ames didn’t hesitate; he fired three times.
Unlike Agent Brett Cherry, Director Ames’s aim was true.
CHAPTER 73
Kendra barely felt the bullet that tore through her throat. She didn’t feel the one that hit her in the chest at all.
Her mind was engulfed in the dark fog. But slowly, as she began to die, it started seeping back out of her. She wanted to scream, to force it back inside her, to demand the demon enter her before she died, but she had nothing left.
As her body collapsed to the ground, she was struck by another vision, only this time it wasn’t a vision of the woman that the angry mob called Anne Laforet, of what they had done to her so long ago, but one of her own.
She was in her car, staring at her father’s face as he looked at her in the backseat. It was Dad.
Only he wasn’t crying now, he was smiling.
“I’ll see you soon, Ken-Ken. Very soon.”
If Kendra had still had lips, they would have curled into a smile.
It was a man’s world, she knew, she was only living in it.
And then she was in the secret room, only it wasn’t Stephanie Black writing the words on the walls, but it was her. She was writing the same words over and over and over again until blisters formed on her thumb and forefinger.
Kendra Wilson’s body shuddered in the mud and then went slack.
Mater est, matrem omnium.
I’ll see you soon, Daddy. Ken-Ken’s finally coming home.
CHAPTER 74
“No!” Brett screamed. He scrambled to his feet, but slipped in the mud.
He was too late.
Two bullets hit Kendra, one in the neck and one in the torso, and the black fog left her as she fell.
The third bullet hit Martin directly above his left eye, and a mist of blood sprayed the muddy ground behind him as he first staggered, and then collapsed on top of Mother’s corpse.
“No!”
Tears streaming down his face, he started to run to Kendra, his feet slipping in the mud with every step.
He barely realized that the girls were back, all around him again, but they no longer seemed interested in what he was doing.
One of the older girls passed directly in front of him and stopped, turning her gaze to the sky. For reasons he didn’t understand, he knew this girl, even though she wasn’t in any of the files that he had looked at.
It was Charlotte Barker, daughter of the deranged woman that had been water boarded by Father John and Father Callahan.
“Enter me!” Charlotte yelled.
Brett slipped again and smashed back to the ground. Mud dripping from his face, he glanced around. The girls weren’t running anymore; they had all stopped. And like the older one, they too had started yelling.
“Enter me!” they yelled in unison.
Brett managed to hoist himself again to his feet and he half crawled, half ran to the three bodies.
“Enter me! Enter me!” they chanted as they closed in on him.
Exhaustion hit him like a ton of bricks, as did the weight of not understanding what had happened, what the fuck was going on.
Somewhere far away, he heard Peter McGuire yell again.
“Lacy!”
And then Brett finally made it to Kendra.
She was dead, Director Ames having ended her misery. Her black body was almost indistinguishable from Mother’s, save the glowing red initials on the latter’s back: BH.
Martin had been shot in the head, and Father John had died from an apparent heart attack.
The girls had been saved, but as they continued to shout, he doubted that they, like he, would come out of this whole.
“I’ll protect you from them, Kendra,” Brett whispered, tears streaming down his face. He collapsed on top of his lover’s body.
Her skin was crispy and hot, but it didn’t bother him. Sobbing, he heard a whoosh of air, and opened his eyes one last time.
The girls had formed a tight circle around him and the other corpses, and a whirlwind of dark air that seemed to originate from Mother swirled about their heads. As he watched, their gazed lifted skyward, their mouths wide, just like Kendra had done when she had thought she was clutching Mother.
He took a deep breath and allowed fatigue to take over.
I’m so sorry, Kendra. I should have told you. I should have told you about the letter.
His eyelids were so heavy that it was all he could do to keep them open.
In an instant, the cloud was gone and the girls had scattered. He caught the last glimpses of their blonde heads receding into the woods behind the still burning pile of wood.
And then he closed his eyes again, but this time when he heard a shout—Director Ames, he thought—he didn’t open them.
For what felt like the first time in an eternity, FBI Agent Brett Cherry slept.
EPILOGUE
SEVEN PEOPLE; SEVEN PEOPLE WERE all that attended Kendra Wilson’s funeral. And this fact, as much as any other, brought tears to Brett’s eyes. As he stared with blurred vision at the people sitting on the white foldable chairs, he surveyed their faces.
There was Detective Tennison, his black face so heavily etched with lines that he looked more like a piece of pottery than a human being, the thick bags under his eyes acting as swollen lids when he looked down. There was Agent Paul Grover, his young face drawn downward in a perpetual grimace, and there was Director Ames at the back, his face mostly covered by a pair of sunglasses. Seeing him, Brett gripped the podium a little tighter. There were two other agents, Agent Gerald Smythe and Agent Randall Hart, both ex-partners, sitting off to one side, separated from the others.
And there was himself, Agent Brett Cherry, who had loved Kendra more than all of these people combined, maybe, but who’d never really known who Kendra was. But if he knew one thing, he knew she was more than the scars, the kinky sex, the curt, almost non-feeling demeanor that she had projected to the world. She was those things, yes, but she was also more.
Brett cleared his throat and began speaking.
“Kendra was
about numbers, I think. Not that she cared particularly about them, but I think they sum up a lot about her.” He paused, licking his lips. “Forty-seven, twelve, twenty-nine, and thirty. Forty-seven: the number of criminals that she was either directly or indirectly responsible for putting behind bars. Twelve: twelve years she was a member of the FBI. But perhaps the most important number is twenty-nine. Throughout her twelve years as an agent, Kendra saved twenty-nine children. Think about that for a moment.”
Brett paused, as much to allow them to follow his instructions as it was to choke out the next words—mostly because they weren’t true.
“Kendra, as we know, didn’t have any family, and didn’t have any children of her own. But out there—” He paused, pointing into the distance, down the small embankment that led back to the funeral home. “Out there, she—”
Brett hesitated. For a brief second, he thought he saw someone in the window on the second floor of the funeral home. It was as if someone was poking their face out from behind the curtain. Brett squinted and thought he made out a small, blonde head of hair and a round pink face. He blinked rapidly, clearing the tears from his eyes.
There was no one there.
He shook his head, a subtle gesture, trying to regain his focus.
“But out there,” he continued, “out there are twenty-nine children that we can safely say wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for Kendra Wilson. They might be too young to know it, and probably most will never know what she did to save them, but they are alive because of her. But despite this fact, Kendra never wanted any accolades for what she did. She just wanted to be left alone to do her job.”
More tears came as Brett reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn envelope. As he teased the letter out, his eyes flicked back up to the window of the large gray funeral home.
He could have sworn that the curtain was still settling.
“I think,” he said as he unfolded the letter, “that there is one thing we can all agree with here today: we all wish that we had gotten to know Kendra better. Even me, her partner for nearly seven years, standing up here today talking about her—I’m guilty of not getting to know the real Kendra.”
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