by Ted Dekker
“Like our own society,” she said, looking at him. “Some would say.”
“Very good, Doctor.”
The last bag contained a wrinkled page that had been ripped out of the first book of the Bible. Genesis. Chapter three. King James Version.
Daniel lifted it up to the light so that he could see the tiny type on the opposite side. No marks that he could see.
“May I?” Lori reached for the bag and held it up. “The story of the fall,” she said. “Adam and Eve.”
“Eve is tricked by the serpent and eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I’ve pored over every word of the story two dozen times. We’ve been pretty sure he was taking his cues from the account of Eve, but this is the first time he’s left corroborating evidence.”
“Question is, what does meningitis have to do with the fall of man?”
She faced him, eyes bright, and answered her own question. “The meninges shield the mind from disease. Like a layer of innocence.”
Impressive. It had taken him a year to draw the same conclusion, without the benefit of the extensive profile she’d read, granted. Still. Maybe it was the doctor in her.
“Destroy the meninges, destroy the mind,” Daniel said. “That’s right. Our boy is reliving the fall of man by introducing a disease that pierces the veil of innocence and kills the victim. Who’d have thought that the third chapter of Genesis could be such a lethal weapon?” He indicated the bag. “Have it scanned for any marks that aren’t indigenous.”
The blackness from his nightmare lapped at his mind, darkening his vision. He instinctively steadied himself with one hand on the table. No fear. The darkness seemed to stall, and for a moment he thought this change might indicate a reprieve from the episodes of—
The fear came, like a sledgehammer from heaven, slamming into his throat.
Every nerve in his body stretched tight as if set ablaze with kerosene. The air was sucked from his lungs, leaving him vacant. But it was the darkness . . . A pit of bitter cold despite the heat.
Horror.
Daniel felt his legs buckle. His chin struck the table before he could catch his fall, and with that blow to his head, the fear was gone.
“Daniel.” Lori knelt over him.
He heard the door open. “Daniel?”
Brit rounded the table as he struggled to his knees. He quickly checked his chin and was relieved to find no blood.
“You okay? What happened?”
He got up with Lori’s help and brushed his slacks. “Okay, that was embarrassing. I missed the chair.” He forced a whimsical grin. “You pull the chair out?”
The agent’s eyebrow cocked.
“You see this?” Daniel handed Brit the wrinkled page from Genesis.
Brit took the bag, eyes on Daniel’s trembling hand. “You sure you’re okay?”
It took every ounce of his concentration to keep from quaking head to toe in the brutal fear’s aftermath. Daniel sat. “I hit my head on the table,” he said, adjusting his beanie. “I’ll be fine.”
Brit set the evidence bag down on the table. “I’ve already had it processed. One latent print matching Eve’s. They found this page crammed in a dash vent.”
Daniel had to get to a therapist, despite knowing that therapy would offer no help for his condition. A sedative, on the other hand, might.
Brit left them alone again a few minutes later, and Daniel’s resolve to hold strong broke the moment the door closed. He placed both arms on the table and rested his forehead between them.
Lori’s cool hand touched the back of his neck and began to knead his tight muscles. She remained silent, a small gift that he appreciated. There wasn’t much that could be said. He had to find a way to stop the fear.
Any way.
“Maybe we should try a stronger dose,” he said.
Her hands moved to his shoulders. “Let’s pretend you didn’t say that.”
“You think you can massage it out of me?”
“You prefer me to beat it out of you with a sledgehammer? Because that’s what a stronger dose of DMT would do. It could kill you. Out of the question.”
“Then what?”
“Time.”
Daniel stood and walked toward the door. “I don’t have time.” He opened the door and stepped into the hallway before remembering that his car was still parked at the apartment.
“Can you give me a ride home?”
“Already?”
“Now. I can’t be here.”
SEVENTEEN
DANIEL WORKED FROM home the rest of the day, although worked perhaps mischaracterized the way he spent the hours.
He refused to speak to Lori about the recurring episodes despite her questioning on two different occasions. She suggested discussing the developments in the Eve case over dinner, but the prospect of having a panic attack while waiting to be seated at a restaurant was enough for him to padlock his door.
No, he needed some time alone. He instructed her to fax the reports as they came in. He’d study them from home, where he could focus without worrying about collapsing on a crowded street. He sounded calm and reasoned on the phone.
Alone, he paced his apartment like a tiger, searching his memory and his texts for a morsel of anything that might ease his torment.
And when his memory came up blank, he exhausted Google, drilling as deep as the search engine would allow, searching for case studies with similar signatures. Even remotely similar. Psychosis. Near death. Acute paranoia. Delusional disorders of any kind that attacked the nervous system.
His suffering was characterized by nondelusional anxiety, that much was clear. Most likely a form of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by his death experience. But the acute symptoms he was facing weren’t adequately explained in the literature he scanned.
In fact, only those cases which involved near-death experiences approximated his own symptoms. This whole business of the mind reacting to death by washing itself with overwhelmingly strong electrochemical stimuli was just plain annoying. The victim’s brain would be forever short-circuited if he didn’t actually terminally die.
In the end, his search rewarded him with nothing but the general understanding that the human brain was a mysterious, little-understood organ that made computers look like blocks of concrete by comparison. But he already knew that.
He asked a colleague who was also a physician to call in a prescription for Ativan, a relaxant commonly prescribed to calm anxiety. Relatively confident that he wouldn’t suffer an attack within thirty minutes of another, Daniel chanced a drive to the Vons drugstore at six that evening.
He took two Ativan and a sleeping pill he already had in his medicine cabinet and readied himself to fall into a deadened sleep. Strange how quickly his priorities had changed. His whole rationale for going dark had been borne out of an obsession to find Eve. Now he only wanted out of this new darkness.
Two Ativan with the sleeping pill should have laid him out flat. They did. For two hours.
He jerked up from his sofa at nine, wet from a cold sweat, heart slamming through the powerful drugs’ effects like a ship’s pistons.
The fear passed, but now a new kind of horror emerged. If a double dose of Ativan couldn’t give him any peace, nothing short of an anesthetic would. And even then, what if the anesthetic put him under but didn’t stop the fear? What if he was forced to lay incapacitated as terror wracked his mind? A frightening prospect.
Daniel lay on the couch and began to seriously fear the next onslaught.
Surviving another case of horror at eleven, he almost called Lori to come and sit with him. But the idea that he, a renowned behavioral psychologist who hunted society’s vilest killers, could only fall asleep in the arms of a beautiful doctor struck him as ridiculous.
He finally drifted off to sleep at two the next morning and awoke to the phone’s shrill ring at ten. He’d slept through the night? Relief washed over him.
Then he remembered that he hadn�
��t slept through the last eight hours. In fact, he’d been repeatedly awakened by the dark form at the end of his bed.
He let the answering machine pick up the call from Lori, who was worried about him. The report on the stolen van from Montana had come in. Someone from the Santa Monica PD had called. They were turning up nothing definitive on the car or the driver but would send what they had to his e-mail.
“Call me, Daniel. I’m worried about you.”
He took a shower, brushed his teeth. Drank a glass of orange juice. Tried to ignore the anxiety brought on by the anticipation of having to live through another day of fear.
He wondered where the term basket case came from. Maybe they’d caged lunatics in large baskets at one time, before the padded cell was introduced as a more humane form of imprisonment.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually called in sick. Although he wasn’t technically sick—or maybe he was—Daniel decided that he would stay in for the day. If anything came up, Lori would call. Brit would call. Montova would call. They all needed him. At least when it came to Eve, they needed him.
The doorbell rang at noon. Daniel hurried out of his office where he’d been studying cases of NDEs, which helped him tolerate the time between his anxiety attacks. With any luck this would be Lori, he thought, then immediately wondered why he hadn’t just called her up if he wanted to see her so badly.
Because he was sick. In the head. And to be perfectly honest, a bit embarrassed about being sick in the head.
But it wasn’t Lori. It was the police, following up on several complaints that had been called in last night. Evidently someone in the vicinity had been heard screaming during the early morning hours. Was he aware of the disturbance, and had he heard anything himself?
“Screaming, as in someone who’s being tortured screaming?”
“We’re not sure. Just screaming. But it was enough to wake two different parties, and it happened three times for about a minute each time. You hear it?”
“No. You sure it was here, not down the street?”
“We’re checking all the houses. Probably nothing, but if you hear anything, please give us a call.” The officer tipped his hat. “Afternoon.”
Daniel closed the door and engaged the dead bolt. How this had happened to him, of all people, was beyond him. He wasn’t some stray psychotic who needed a straightjacket. He was the one who put stray psychotics in those straightjackets.
Lori called an hour later, and he explained that he had been making some progress on a new theory of his. He wasn’t ready to run it by her yet. Give him a couple days and he’d test it out on her.
Did he need some company? Was he coping? Maybe he should get out and take a walk.
He did have some company, haunting him from the end of his bed, but he didn’t say that. He said he was coping just fine. He just needed a few days to sort it all out.
The reasonable part of him wanted to beg her to spend the night with him, holding his hand, with instructions to muzzle him if he started to scream. But he couldn’t stoop that low.
That night Daniel took another two Ativan and added a Seroquel—all told, a dangerous but just tolerable dose for a healthy male his weight. The medication knocked him out, a good thing.
He woke screaming two hours later. Not a good thing.
He’d forgotten about the police visit until now and, fearing the neighbors might be even now crawling out of their windows to isolate the sound, he resorted to a thought that had come to him earlier that afternoon.
Still groggy from the drugs, Daniel retrieved a roll of duct tape from the toolbox in his garage. Stumbling back to bed, he ripped off a six-inch length, plastered it tight over his lips, and lay back down.
An hour later he woke screaming into the tape. He didn’t like the taste of the adhesive, but at least the tape had worked, he thought, and he succumbed to the mind-numbing drugs once again.
DANIEL MANUFACTURED AND effectively delivered a dozen excuses not to see Lori over the next two days. They spoke at length around noon each day, reviewing new data that had trickled in, none of it particularly helpful, then again on both evenings, satisfying Lori that he was indeed okay.
She had to know that he wasn’t. No matter where the discussion went, he always found a way to bring it back to the ND effects, as he called the anxiety attacks. He assured Lori the effects weren’t getting any worse, but he feared the tone of his voice betrayed the truth.
In reality, not only were the ND effects growing stronger, but they also came at him with greater frequency. And with more form. A faceless Eve was there, staring at him out of the darkness as he had the night in Manitou Springs, mocking Daniel’s death.
He was so desperate for relief by the end of that week that on the second night of his isolation, he called Lori back an hour after they’d hung up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Lori.”
“Daniel?”
A fist lodged itself in his throat, refusing him air, much less a voice.
“Daniel, are you okay? I’m coming over.”
“No. No, it’s fine. I just . . .”
“No, it’s not fine. It’s worse, isn’t it?”
“No, not—”
“Stop lying to me, Daniel, for the love of—”
“Okay! It’s worse!” He gushed, unable to stop himself. “It’s a lot worse, but there’s nothing anyone . . .” He closed his eyes and tried to settle himself.
“Okay, that’s it, I’m coming over. You hang tight, I’m—”
“Please, Lori. No. I’m not . . . Really, there’s nothing you can do. I wish there was, believe me.” He wanted to tell her more. So he did. “I’m sleeping with tape over my mouth.”
“You’re what?”
“To keep from waking the neighbors. You know . . . duct tape. It’s just a practical thing.”
The line remained silent.
“It’s been a week and it’s not getting better, Lori. I don’t know what to do.”
“You should check yourself back into a hospital, that’s what you should do! I know a doctor at Cedars-Sinai who specializes in severe—”
“You’re not listening, Lori. Short of putting me under with anesthesia, I’m alone to face this fear.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that! I have a doctorate in behavioral science, or does the fact that I’m barely hanging on change that too?”
“I’m sorry.”
They talked another fifteen minutes and accomplished nothing more than passing time. Once more she asked him if she could come over, and once more he rejected the idea.
Daniel spent another night soaking his sheets with sweat and screaming into duct tape.
The next day proved to be the worst day yet. Eve had gone quiet, as he always did between lunar cycles. The investigation had settled into a quagmire of guesses based on new evidence that offered nothing new.
Lori didn’t find it within herself to call and check on Daniel, and he doubted it was because she was too busy. He knew how effectively repeated rejection dampened any relationship. He’d now been on both sides.
It was his fourth full day at home, and with each passing hour he couldn’t escape the growing certainty that at some point his slow descent into terror would become too much. A certain straw would finally break this camel’s back.
He could not know that the straw would come at five thirty that very evening with a single knock on his door.
Daniel opened the door wide, hoping it was Lori, because as strong as he needed to be, his strength was crumbling.
It wasn’t Lori. It was Brit Holman. And his face was pale.
“Hello, Brit.”
Brit dipped his head. “Daniel. Can I come in?”
“What’s wrong?”
“I . . . Well, I should probably—”
“Just spit it out, Brit.”
“It’s Heather.”
“What about her? You talk to her about the phone calls
?”
“She missed our lunch appointment today. When I called the office, they said she’d missed a court appearance this morning without calling in.”
Daniel reached for a chair. “She has to be home.”
“I called. There’s no response.”
What was the man saying?
“I think Heather may be missing, Daniel.”
The fear descended on him then, while he stood in the doorway. A brutal kick to his chest that made him gasp, not unlike a dozen other similar barrages of fear he’d endured that day.
But this one didn’t ease up. And it screamed through his head with one word.
Eve.
EIGHTEEN
DANIEL MOVED WITHOUT clear thought or consideration. Past Brit, knocking the man to one side. Over a small hedge that bordered a low-maintenance rock garden. Through the garage’s side door.
“I’ll come with you!” Brit said. Daniel barely heard him.
His black Lexus sat in the dark, undisturbed for four days now. He slid behind the wheel, punched the garage door opener, and fired the engine.
Only then did he remember the near-death effects. How long they left him alone might determine how long he lived. But the drive to Heather’s house was only fifteen minutes.
For the first time he was thankful he’d forced himself to dress respectably each morning—an ineffective ploy to convince himself that all was fine. He tore out of the garage, leaving Brit at the door, jerked the wheel hard to his right at the end of the driveway, and shot into the street in front of a white sedan that swerved to miss him.
The fear that had stormed him thirty seconds earlier hadn’t abated, but he knew it wasn’t an ND effect. The near-death effects hit hard and throbbed through his nerves like giant waves of energy.
The fear he faced now pushed a steady chill along his nerves.
His phone chirped and he grabbed it. Brit. He spoke quickly, before Brit could. “I’ll give you a call, Brit. I’m just going to check the house and then I’ll call you.”
