I nodded, then felt a tugging at my mind. “You have Abby,” I said. “Hidden somewhere, along with Tim’s daughter and some other kids.”
Eisler was sitting next to Reverend Bob, looking bored. Bob turned to look at him and snarled slightly, showing fang, then looked back at me. “Our police chief assures me that this arrangement will temper your actions and judgments, Mr. Ashton. But he might not know what he’s talking about.”
I met Bob’s eyes, saying nothing. Eisler kept his face stone-blank.
“I’ve never liked children myself,” Bob went on. “And for all I know you might put some vague notion of the greater good against your daughter’s life and make a…poor decision.”
I shook my head. I had no answer for that.
Eisler smiled. “Therefore I have a surprise for Mr. Eisler tonight. If you choose to…misbehave, Mr. Ashton? I will hunt down and drink from not only your daughter but also his wife. Martha is a lovely woman, don’t you think?”
Eisler jumped up from the table. “Hold it right there!”
Bob barely glanced at him. “Or what, Mr. Eisler? Calm yourself and sit down.”
Back facing me. “Do you understand?”
I found myself nodding. And thinking: drink from them? Bob was seriously a vampire? Or was he bluffing somehow? Looking into his face…I didn’t think he was.
“Very well. Now, you may harbor some plan to escape, or rescue your daughter, during the day. It might even work, if I didn’t take precautions. So it’s time for you to open up.”
Bob reached out and gently took hold of my chin, pointing my face at his. I wanted to slap his hand away but let him do it—and noticed for the first time that Bob’s pupils had turned a dark red. Had that just happened? Or had they been that way since he started changing?
What color were his eyes before? I couldn’t remember. Brown, maybe?
I blinked at him. “Open up?”
“Your mind, Mr. Ashton. You will let me into it, and you will not fight me.”
I glanced briefly at Eisler, who was sitting down again and giving me a look that I interpreted to mean he’d be happy to kill me right there at the table. On the other hand I thought he’d be happy to kill Bob too. Maybe there was something I could use in that.
“Sure,” my mouth said.
Then Bob laughed. “That was just to show you what to do. Now, it’s your turn. Agree, Mr. Ashton. Freely, and of your own will.”
I felt an oppressive weight lift itself from my mind, and could suddenly feel the other minds around me. Bob’s was a great red fire, and Eisler’s not too different. Most were dim. Some seemed nearly…gone.
“Now. Mr. Ashton.”
I swallowed. I hadn’t realized he’d been influencing me all along. But…apparently I’d been unconsciously fighting him off. Somewhat.
Which I needed to stop doing. For now. I jerked a nod, then tried to relax—meanwhile hoping that whatever he was about to do wouldn’t be permanent.
“Very nice,” Bob said with a faint smile. “Let us begin.”
Chapter Nineteen
I was very important. We all served the Master but my role was crucial. Only I could be trusted with important missions and instructions. During the day, at least. At night I slept deeply, and always woke refreshed.
Soon I noted that the people from the mountain had all come to live with us in town, and that was good because we were all one community. It was time for everyone to work together.
Sometimes I found people who didn’t want to cooperate, or who became injured and were not willing to heal themselves quickly enough to return to their assigned tasks. I felt a tug of regret when this happened, but it did mean the Master could have a good Hunt.
I had never seen a Hunt, of course, because they never happened in the daytime. But the Master usually let me choose his prey for him, which was good because at least that way we didn’t lose able-bodied and willing workers.
Sometimes my mind fluttered, especially in the middle of the day, and I would begin to wonder what I was doing, or why, or have strange urges to disobey.
But I fought the urges to a standstill, and also I made sure the others in our community were obedient and productive during the daytime hours.
It was very important work and I was very proud the Master had honored me with it.
But…the fluttery feelings got stronger. I asked the Chief to help, but he was losing his ability to move in the daytime. He wasn’t becoming like the Master, but his mind and essence seemed more similar to the Master’s than to mine.
It was too bad he could not help me, but I liked that he usually could not reach my mind during the day. For some reason, although I knew we both did very important work, I did not like him. He did not like me either.
Also the doctor was difficult. He helped the sick when he could, and saved some workers from the Hunt. I liked that but he looked at me strangely and I could not reach his mind. Neither could the Chief. But as long as he caused no trouble and was productive he could stay. For a while at least.
Another mind that gave me trouble belonged to the Captain. He seemed loyal, though, and helped me with the workers. Some of them seemed to take orders better from him than from me. I did not like this but the important thing was to serve the Master.
Still, the fluttery feelings grew, and I began to have horrible headaches in the middle of the day. I tried to lie down and rest but had too much energy, so I began taking time to walk in the town and survey what the Captain called our perimeter.
Sometimes I found new workers, and brought them in. This was good. Perhaps that was why I needed to move away from the community for a while every day?
One day the Chief told me, very early in the morning, that I was to lead a group to examine houses. This was good work. We often found useful items, and being away from the rest of the community settled my mind.
The doctor looked at me strangely on this day, and said he would come with us. I shrugged. We would probably not find sick people—we rarely did, anymore. But there was little for him to do at the high school either. It was good that he wanted to be productive, so I smiled and told him he was welcome to join my group.
We searched two houses and found only small items. My head began to hurt again, so I sent teams into the next two houses, and went to stand in some nearby woods. The doctor came with me.
I smiled at him, because the doctor’s head did not hurt me. “We will search more houses this afternoon,” I told him. “We will find things to please the Master.”
He gave me another one of his strange looks. I could tell his mind was disturbed but could not reach it to calm him. After a while I shrugged, and closed my eyes to better fight off my headache.
Suddenly I felt a strange pain in my right thigh, and looked down. Odd! The doctor had injected me, but I was not sick! I smiled at him, and started to explain his error…but then darkness claimed me in the middle of the day.
* * *
“Ash!” Somebody was shaking my shoulder. “Ash! Wake up!”
I blinked; tried to focus. My heart sledgehammered my chest and my body vibrated. “Tim?”
He nodded. “You okay, man? I dosed you pretty good, there. Didn’t expect you to pass out though.”
“I…guess?” I looked more closely at him. “You’re a wreck. What the hell have you been doing to yourself?”
A quick grin. “Epinephrine. Every damned day. Look, Ash, Slimy Bob has been all up in your brain. You remember that?”
“Huh?” But I sort of did. My memories were fuzzy, but I could recall day after day of following orders. Worse, I’d been enforcing Bob’s commands during the day. Hadn’t I?
How many people had I killed, or sentenced to death for Bob’s nighttime hunting pleasure? I tried to talk, but turned my head and vomited instead.
“Good!” Tim said. “Didn’t plan on that either, but if you look sick I have more of a reason to hang around. Look—we don’t have much time. Short version is I noticed people go
t out of Bob’s control if they got too excited. Which is hard to do, because he sort of numbs your brain. He’s a lot better at it than he used to be, but I guess I was always a little excitable and I’ve been dosing myself every day for the last month, so…”
I nodded, shell-shocked, my mind reeling, but still getting his point. “So you’re immune?”
“No! Just…resistant. It’s easier to fight his control during the day. Probably because he’s sleeping. And you seemed to be getting a little jittery on your own, so I took a chance and dosed you.”
I wanted to hurl again, and my pulse beat so fast and hard I hoped I didn’t have any previously undiagnosed heart condition—and the shame of what I had been doing nearly overwhelmed me. “So…you woke me up, man. Thank you. But I’ll just go under again, right? Next time he talks to me? Or before.”
Tim shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Look, if I could hypnotize you or something I would. But these aren’t exactly the ideal conditions for it. Thing is, if you can remember to find me when your head hurts? I can dose you again. Maybe you can start to build up a resistance?”
God. More of this, every day. I took in Tim’s disheveled state, bloodshot eyes, and too-thin face. “Heck of a diet plan, too,” I said.
“What? Oh. Yeah. That too. Beats Weight Watchers for sure.” He gave me a searching gaze. “You up for this?”
I shrugged. “Got to. Don’t I?”
“Yeah. I think so. McDermott’s on board too, but he’s started to slip back under. Don’t know why.”
I could see that bothered him. Me too, now that I was thinking about it.
Then I opened my mouth to warn Tim that some workers were starting to walk toward us, but he’d spotted them. “No time to talk more, man. Come find me tomorrow. I’ll zap you again.”
I nodded and waved him away. After a moment I shoved myself back to a sitting position, then grabbed a tree and pulled myself upright.
“Two more houses on this side of the street,” I told the workers. “Then we’ll switch sides. Be sure to mark the ones we’ve emptied.”
Then, when they turned away to go back to their task, I let my face react to what I’d just seen.
My god. Were any of us still human? Under Bob’s influence I’d barely noticed. But two of the people I’d brought with me were obviously fully adult and about three feet tall. One of the others was so swollen with fat and muscle that he could barely fit through a door—and I recognized him. It was Leo Morrison, my erstwhile history teacher. The man who’d pulled me into his house to hide from marching teenagers. He’d left an eye, as he’d used to put it, back in Vietnam. That had always made me think of a bloodshot brown-pupiled orb, sinking slowly in a swamp of green—but grossing us kids out was obviously his goal when he talked about it so I’d tried not to show a reaction.
He’d always worn a monocle over his good eye, and occasionally popped out the glass one to roll around his desk. Occasionally he’d hold it up and ask it a question. But now his single functional eye had migrated to the center of his forehead, and there was no sign of the glass replica. So where, I found myself wondering, had he left that one?
Tentatively I reached up and felt my own face. And ears. And worked my shoulders. Still normal, as far as I could tell.
For how long?
* * *
Hairy. Tall. Short. Winged. Scaled. The people of Henge had nearly all changed physically, in one way or another.
I did what I could not to stare at them. Though…I seemed to be their daytime overseer. Did Bob have any other eyes among them? Was anyone actually watching me?
Slowly, shakily, I got through the day—until around noon, when I felt strange images and emotions swirling in my head. What was it? Why was I so frightened?
Then I realized: it was a memory. Bob had once led me to his private chambers, beneath the courtyard…back when I was more fully under his control.
* * *
“This way,” Bob had said, leading my unresisting body into the courtyard at the center of the high school.
I followed him as he jumped down into a pit, then shouted for a torch. For my benefit, I supposed, since from the way he acted while we waited he seemed to see very well without it.
Around a corner we went. Into a room with several armed guards. Fat and sluglike, white-skinned and red-eyed like Bob but…they didn’t speak. I got the sense that they couldn’t.
“The children,” Bob intoned, “have tunnels much like these. Not far away. In fact I had them bring their little friends to help excavate my home. Do you like it, Mr. Ashton?”
The place stank of death, decay, and…I had burned ants with a magnifying glass when I was a kid. There was something of that too.
Worse, one wall was obscured by a vast hanging spiderweb. Inside it I could see different shapes. I looked closer. The shapes were…did Bob store his food here? Were they all—?
But then I saw one of the shapes turn its head toward me. And would have charged Bob right there, but his grip on my mind would not let me twitch a muscle.
“Yes,” Bob had said to me. “That one is your daughter. I don’t expect you to break free of my control, Mr. Ashton. But if you ever do…remember, she sleeps right here. With me. I will keep her alive for you. She will be fed. But if I am ever attacked as I sleep during the day, by anyone, the very first thing my guards here will do is kill your daughter. These guards never leave this chamber. So…it would be best if you actively discourage that sort of activity. Do you understand?”
* * *
After the memory of Abby’s imprisonment had returned to me I barely managed to get through the day without lashing out wildly. But that wouldn’t help. I settled down finally in the room I’d made my own, and stared at the ceiling. Waiting.
Tomorrow, would I be myself still? Or would I again become one of Bob’s mind-slaves? Would he notice that I had been freed, even temporarily? Had Tim’s interference just killed Abby?
A lot of the minds near me seemed to be somehow…blunted. Vague and unfocused. Was that due to stress, or trauma, or Bob’s influence? Or had they always been like that?
But something else about the memory of going underground with Bob tugged at my mind. Suddenly I remembered—Sam, the teenager from our compound, the one who’d been such a great hunter—he’d been there with us in Bob’s home. The guards in Bob’s home—they were teenagers! And Sam had seemed to be in charge of the kids. He was more than he’d seemed when he’d come to us up on the mountain. More than that, his mind had seemed smooth, thoroughly alien, but also free of the red tinge of Bob’s influence. And I’d had the sense that underground tunnels connected Bob’s lair to the teenagers’…camp, or hive, or whatever it was.
Bob had hidden that part of the memory more deeply in my mind than the rest.
How much could I trust my impressions of Sam? At one point I’d thought he’d been a relatively normal teenager. Had he been Bob’s spy in our camp? How long had he been the…leader?…of the teens? Or was he more of a liaison?
I had a lot to figure out. A lot to atone for. But I felt my eyes closing…and as the sky outside darkened the mind-feel changed around me. People’s essences seemed to become weaker. Less vibrant. Except for one, that hadn’t been present at all until just now. It glowed red, dark red, and swirled through all the others…
My sharp-edged thoughts became dull and fitful. Energy turned to lassitude. I tried to fight it and remain conscious, but could feel myself drifting away.
One last thing became crystal-clear even as my eyes closed: Bob was awake.
* * *
Weeks later I sensed something strange to the north, and was already moving out of the high school with a squad of twelve when we were met by a runner.
“Men coming. Group of four. Carrying a white flag,” the man told me, panting.
I studied him. “Who’s out there?”
“Carmody, Duncan, and Compton. They were holding back when I left. Watching.”
“How far?”
“Just past Reverend Bob’s church,” he said.
I nodded. “We’ll head out. Follow when you can breathe, then catch up if you can. We’re not going to move quickly.”
He nodded, sprawling on the ground and elevating his legs by bracing his feet on an elm tree.
I gathered my men by eye. Sort of. “No shooting unless I say so,” I told them. “They might be friendly.”
* * *
The group we were approaching had apparently stopped in the church itself. I wondered whether that had been deliberate. I studied the building from behind a grove of trees that had sprung up along a creekbed, giving me a clear view across about a quarter mile of field to Bob’s old haunt.
Shrugging, I made up my mind. “You guys stay here,” I told my guys. “I’m going to see if they want to talk.”
I got uneasy agreement from my followers. But…I didn’t sense hostility, or much fear either. Most people didn’t seem to have a lot of resistance to following orders left in them, lately. It was useful, but I also wanted to apologize. To help them break free. But to my shame, I hadn’t found the courage to do anything about it. And might not, as long as Bob held my daughter underground. If her fate was truly up to him.
I walked slowly across the field, trying not to focus on the picture of Sam's enigmatic face that was suddenly in my mind. Out in the real world, nothing moved. I caught a quick impression of someone watching me—from the woods on the other side of the road, not from the church itself—and nodded to myself.
I didn’t want a battle. Or at least…not yet.
I knocked to the side of an open door. “I’m friendly,” I called. “I left my men outside and came alone. You folks want to talk?”
I heard a laugh behind me, and tried not to jump when a hand fell on my shoulder. “Good to know,” a voice said.
I turned and saw a man with black and silver hair. He held a shotgun casually in his left hand, and wore a checked shirt, suspenders, and work pants. Work boots too. He looked like…a local, really. But I didn’t know him.
The Secret: A Thriller Page 20
