Maybe Walter was right. Did knowing the truth make the wounds heal, or only keep them fresh? Yet even after Dr. Forrest’s bizarre behavior, Julia wondered how she’d face her problems without her therapist’s help.
“Look,” Walter said, sitting down beside her. He fumbled in the backpack and took out the baseball cards that had been lying on her coffee table. “I brought these. I wasn’t thinking too clearly, or I’d have grabbed something useful. I got kind of scared when I saw Hartley snooping around.”
Julia took the cards and flipped through them. The ludicrousness of their situation struck her like a cold slap. Holed up in a tiny cabin in the woods, not knowing whom to trust, unable even to call the cops because the cops were Creeps. Nothing to do but wait for the boogeyman to come claim her. Unless she went insane first.
She moved aside so Walter could put more wood on the fire. Exhaustion hit her all at once, and she yawned.
“Go on up in the loft,” Walter said. “Might as well get some sleep.”
Julia wondered if he would try and join her in the tiny loft. She didn’t want to deal with any more emotional entanglement than they had already been thrown into. Still, it would be nice to have someone close by, just in case the bad dreams and panic came in the night. And maybe, just maybe, she could summon up some small comfort and warmth to offer Walter. “What about you?”
“I’m going to stay up a while,” he said. He went to an old cedar chest in the corner and took out some quilts. He shook them and tossed them up on the loft. “I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to follow us in the dark and the rain, but I’m not too sleepy, anyway. I’ll just keep the fire going for a while. Got my sleeping bag here if I need it.”
Julia moved wearily to the ladder and climbed as if someone else were controlling her tired muscles. The quilts were spread over what felt like a thin foam pad at the top of the loft. The bedding smelled faintly of smoke and leaves. Julia rolled onto the quilts and bundled herself up.
She inched to the edge of the loft and looked down at Walter. He was turning their wet clothes over so they could finish drying. His hands were oddly gentle with her clothes. When he finished, he returned to his vigil at the hearth and opened his Bible.
“Walter?” she murmured.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For everything.”
He looked up at the loft. “It ain’t nothing. Sweet dreams.”
She recalled the image of the meadow that Walter had helped her summon when she panicked at the gas station phone. She watched the shimmering clouds floating around in her imagination, and her breathing fell into a slow, even rhythm. Once, she saw the barn of her childhood rise in the midst of the meadow, but she was able to drive that horror from her visions.
I am a mountain. They can’t break me.
And behind the mountain was a face, swirling in mists and clouds. She tried to focus, to believe, and though its features were veiled, she sensed a gentle smile.
Sleep soon drifted over her like a thick fog.
A noise awoke her in the night, the creak of wood. She opened her eyes to utter darkness. Her feet were cold. Something was touching her, tugging the quilts from her body.
Someone was touching her.
She tried to sit up, but her arms were pinned. Then the thing was on top of her, crushing her breath from her lungs. She couldn’t even cry out. Two glowing red specks appeared in the darkness inches from her face, and the smell of rotten eggs and matches flooded her nostrils. The specks grew brighter, and in their glow she could see the face that wore those impossible eyes.
The skull ring.
The skull had taken flesh and now was coming to get her for good. She wrestled an arm free and clawed at the eyes. Her fingernails sank into meat and she ripped. The face came away in her hands, like a rubber mask, but still the eyes blazed.
Beneath that face was her father’s, unshaven, cruel, leering, the way Dr. Forrest had made her remember him. His tongue snaked in and out between rotted teeth. A goatish scrap of beard sprouted from his chin, and his hot breath slavered across her cheeks. She raked her hand again and grabbed the cloth of his hood.
She yanked the cloth away and this time it was Mitchell who was on top of her, his hands groping and pinching, his expression simultaneously desirous and wicked. He laughed at her struggles, smug in his power. She closed her eyes against the intensity of his red stare and slashed at his face.
More skin and muscle came away, and a voice at her ear said, “He owns you, whore,” and it was Snead’s voice, a voice she knew from 23 years ago.
Snead. The man in the hood. The monster with the knife.
Julia opened her eyes to look at him, but now it was Walter who was above her, his cheeks burning with hate, saliva leaking from between his sharp teeth, the hands gripping her now even more powerful and cruel, bruising, twisting, taking what he wanted. The face shimmered, the features bulged and became the decapitated goat’s head of her childhood.
“You’re mine, Judas bitch. And I take what is mine.”
She screamed as the sinister animal face pressed close and flickered its tongue across her lips. Its foul breath poured into her, burning her from the inside, arousing agony in her scars, awakening every bad memory and switching on the circuits so that pain spasmed through her body. She moaned in disgust as the creature’s feverish flesh pressed against her.
“Julia?”
Walter’s voice, from somewhere behind the goat-thing.
But Walter was in this thing, wasn’t he? Part of it. All of them the devil.
Fingers clutched her ankle, shaking her. She kicked and clawed blindly.
“Hey!” he called again.
She opened her eyes. No darkness, no twin red specks, no goat-creature. The room was suffused with orange light, the fire down to embers.
Walter stood on the ladder, looking at her. “You okay? You were yelling out in your sleep.”
She tried to blink away the nightmare. But her nostrils held the memory of the hellish stench and her flesh was warm from the imagined assault. “Are you one of them, Walter?”
“Shhh. You were having a bad dream, that’s all.”
“Tell me you’re not one of them.” She pulled the blankets to her chin.
“No, I’m one of us.” He patted her leg. “You’re safe here. They won’t get you.”
“I’m scared.” She felt almost as helpless and lost as she had felt as a four-year-old.
The ladder creaked, and then his body lay alongside hers. “It’s going to be just fine,” he whispered.
His arms went around her. She accepted the embrace, snug in the blankets, and drifted back to sleep. This time, no Creeps stalked her dreams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The morning light trickled through the small windows, indicated the storm had passed. Julia left Walter sleeping in the loft and kindled another fire. She rummaged in Walter’s backpack, found some tissue, and went outside to relieve herself. The sky was clear, and Julia’s breath made a mist in front of her face.
The view was spectacular. The cabin stood in the clearing between two stands of hardwood, and a sheer rock cliff rose behind the trees. The ridge was the tallest point for miles. The blue mountaintops rolled out in the distance like the waves of a gentle sea. The clean, brisk breeze brought Julia fully awake, and she welcomed the forest smells.
Walter was right. The Creeps couldn’t get her here. This was the final outpost, a majestic castle, a place where trouble and danger had no business. The woods weren’t threatening. Instead, they formed walls that kept enemies away. Being out under the big sky was like being paroled from the cramped prison of her head.
She went among the trees into the hush of forest. A gray squirrel skittered along the treetops, gathering its winter stores. As she squatted behind an oak, she thought of the night before. Walter had come to her rescue yet again, her very own knight in shining armor. Just like in the bedtime stories her daddy had told her—
�
�And what else did Daddy do, there in your bed?” came Dr. Forrest’s voice, as if from nowhere.
She stood, pulled up the baggy jeans she had borrowed from Walter, and hurried back toward the cabin, afraid more voices would slip from the shadows beneath the oak and hickory. The sun was like the bloodied yolk of an egg over the eastern horizon. A few wisps of pale clouds were all that remained of the storm. Julia looked down the old logging road to make sure no one was approaching, and then went back inside the cabin.
Walter was up, his clothes rumpled, his chin and cheeks bristled by faint stubble. “Morning,” he called cheerfully, though his voice cracked from sleep.
“Hi. Storm’s over.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing.” Walter rattled around in a corner cabinet and pulled out a dented tin coffee pot. “Makes it easier for them to find us. If they’re even bothering to look.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you when I get back.”
Julia stacked some logs on the fire and went outside to gather another armload from the woodpile. Walter came back from the woods with the coffee pot. He hoisted it, and some water sloshed out. “There’s a spring around back. The purest water you’ve ever tasted.”
“And we’re going to mess it up by turning it into coffee?”
Walter smiled, the sun on his face and his tousled hair making him look young. “Sounds like an improvement to me.”
A soft rhythmic sound filled the air, rapidly becoming louder, beating at the air between the mountains. Walter dropped the coffee pot and raced to the Jeep. The engine started and he backed the Jeep under a canopy of spruce. Julia finally recognized the sound, and went inside the cabin as the whir grew louder.
From the window she watched the helicopter cross to the west. The Creeps couldn’t have that much influence, could they? What did they want from her so badly that they were dragging out all their resources? And if she tried to dismiss her paranoia, right there was Walter, ducking under the trees and staring up at the sky.
When the whir of the blades subsided, they looked at each other.
“Do you think it was them?” Julia asked.
He pointed at the chimney. “They would have seen the smoke. If it was them, they’d already be back.”
He gathered the coffee pot and returned to the spring. Julia went inside, gathered her dry clothes from the hearth, and changed quickly before Walter returned. He didn’t remark on her change of clothes, nor on having slept with her. Julia realized it was the first time she’d ever slept with a man without having sex. But then again, Mitchell was the only other man to ever share her bed.
Quit comparing him to Mitchell. They’re not even on the same playing field.
He poured some coffee grounds into a metal sieve and placed the sieve in the pot. Then he hung the pot over the fire from a metal hook. “What’s so funny?”
“Just figuring out which way I’m going crazy this time.”
“I told you, you’re not crazy. You’re miles from civilization, with all the time in the world, with a nice guy who makes a mean cup of coffee. What’s the downside?”
“Uh, you forgot the part where Satan worshippers want to claim my immortal soul.”
“Oh, yeah. I figured this was too good to be true.”
Walter brought some chipped ceramic mugs from the cupboard as the smell of coffee slowly filled the cabin. Julia sat by the fire and watched Walter.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“Wait, I reckon.”
“For them to find us?”
“We ought to just let things die down a little.”
“I wonder what’s happening back at my house.”
“Depends on what they were after. Maybe all they want is you.”
“I still can’t understand why.”
“Maybe they don’t like to lose. Maybe they feel like they have to finish the job or their Big Bad Boogeyman will get upset.” Walter sat beside her and placed the mugs on the hearth. He drew a couple of granola bars from the backpack and passed one to Julia.
“This doesn’t fit the image of the rough-and-ready mountain man’s breakfast,” Julia said.
“Well, I hate to say it, but I ain’t much of a mountain man. I don’t even like hunting. My dad used to take me up here and make me stumble through the woods after him with a gun, but I never could stand to shoot anything.”
“How long do we stay here?” Julia asked.
Walter shrugged. “A day or two. I don’t know.”
She leaned forward and touched his knee. “Do you think Hartley had anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?”
He stared into the fire with a wounded expression. “Sometimes I’m scared that she was one of them. Then I think I’m crazy to even think that. But then you hear people talking about Satan worshippers and what they do to fetuses and babies and kids . . . and she changed after she became pregnant. She became faraway, panicky, suspicious of everybody.”
Julia scooted next to him and wrapped her arms around him, feeling the hard muscles underneath his shirt. She squeezed as tightly as she could and his head leaned against her shoulder.
“Shh,” she whispered. “Just let it go. Don’t let them win. Don’t let him win.”
“Him?”
“Satan.” Walter tensed under her embrace, but she continued. “A lot of Christians don’t think he’s real, that he’s some superstitious relic. Call it evil, bad karma, whatever. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that we don’t let darkness eat us alive, from the inside out.”
She looked past him, lost in the warmth of his body. Here she was, playing analyst when her own head was cluttered. It was a miracle she hadn’t gone over the edge months ago. She pictured Dr. Forrest’s strangely earnest face, the woman unbuttoning her shirt to show the pentagram etched in her belly.
“You’re not alone, Julia,” Dr. Forrest had said.
She shuddered with the memory. How many women were out there thinking they were the brides of Satan? Were most of them willing, like Dr. Forrest, or were they like Julia, lost and scared and screaming as the panic and doubt ate them away from the inside out? Were Satanic sacrifices born or were they made?
“You’re not alone, Judas,” Walter said.
Julia jerked away from him, stood and fled to the door. “What did you say?”
Walter blinked, confused. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, you did. You said ‘You’re not alone, Judas.’“
“What the hell?” His confusion turned to anger.
She backed away another step, hand reaching for the door latch. “It was you. You took the ring, didn’t you? You’re the one who planted the pentagram drawing with ‘Hello Jooolia’ on it. And you messed with the clock. You had a key. An inside job.”
Walter stood and held out his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t flip out on me now, Julia. Please.”
His wounded expression almost convinced her. Almost.
Julia flung open the door and ran into the cold morning, through the trees and away from the cabin. She ran blindly, branches clawing at her face. She glanced back and saw Walter erupt from the cabin door, chasing her.
“Jooolia,” he called, but she didn’t slow. Her heart hammered in her ears. Thoughts spilled out in jagged counterpoint to the rhythm of her legs.
Walter. HE was the Creep. One of THEM, Satan’s sick little servants. He probably killed his wife himself and ripped out his unborn son as a token to his master.
And stupid, gullible Julia Stone had fallen right in with him, had opened herself up and trusted him on the flimsiest of reasoning. She was nothing but the perfect victim, always had been and always would be. She might as well just drop to the ground and wait for Satan to come and do whatever he did with his brides, serve whatever his dark needs were.
Her lungs burned with the coldness of the air. She headed down a slope between trees, slipped on some leaves and fell. She scrambl
ed to her feet. She reached an outcropping of rocks and slithered between two slabs of granite. While resting, she strained her ears to listen for Walter, but all she could hear was her own frantic, ragged breath.
Giant oaks and maples surrounded her, their gnarled branches reaching across the sky. The mountains were obscured, all signs of civilization lost in leaves and bark and laurel. This was the world of nature, the one that Satan ruled. He ruled the world of human nature, as well. He owned Julia. He owned them all.
Surrender. Lie down. Let him have you.
“He owns you, Julia,” came Dr. Forrest’s voice.
Then, Snead: “Time for you to become the whore Judas Stone.”
Walter: “You’re not alone, Judas.”
She clamped her hands over her ears but couldn’t squeeze the voices from her brain. She staggered from the rocks, the sun crazy through the treetops, the mist of her breath making sinister shapes before her face. Satan owned it all.
She closed her eyes, took a few more shambling steps, and fell again. The panic rose like fingers from black graves, twisting, clawing, impatient. When the fingers–his fingers–touched her, she couldn’t even summon the strength to slap at them. They clutched her, tugged possessively.
“Julia,” it said.
Something stirred in the dark corners of her mad house. That voice. Not Walter, not Snead, not Dr. Forrest. Not Satan.
Mitchell?
“Are you okay?”
Her eyes snapped open, and it was Mitchell. His tie was askew, hair mussed, but he was Mitchell Austin, Attorney-at-Law, former fiancé and would-be rapist. The devil made the flesh.
“Mitchell,” was all she could gasp.
“I saw him chasing you,” he said. “Come on, get up. He’ll see us.”
He pulled her to her feet. Julia wobbled and leaned against a tree. “How . . . how did you find me?”
“Deed records.” Mitchell came to her, and she couldn’t will her legs into motion. He took her arm and led her toward a thick stand of laurels. “The cops told me somebody named Triplett had kidnapped you. They didn’t have any leads, but we both know cops aren’t too bright. The cabin was on the family property tax listing.”
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