He emerged from the trees in front of a rocky hill. She had to wait on the edge of the forest until he disappeared up a trail. Then she scuttled across the open ground and found the path he’d taken up the slope.
The path ended at a cave. Inside, she heard metal banging against stone followed by a stream of curse words. The stowaway was inside. She peeked inside to see what he was doing.
He had stolen a hammer and chisel from the camp. With these tools, he worked to carve at the rocks over a big pit. He stood on a crude ladder, chipping away at the stone to carve a circular indentation not much bigger than Molly’s hand. She couldn’t imagine what he planned to do with this hole. As she watched, he carved another and then another at different points above the pit. Among the curse words he uttered she heard him say, “Damned that reverend. I won’t let him do it.”
The reverend? What could the reverend have done to make this Wendell so angry? A gentle, sweet man like Reverend Crane wouldn’t hurt anyone. This boy is crazy, she thought.
Wendell carved six of the holes before hiding the ladder and tools out of sight in the cave. Molly found a rock to hide behind as Wendell hurried out of the cave and disappeared back into the forest. She waited until she was certain he’d gone before she went into the cave.
In the circular pit she found a pool of glowing white water. She looked up at the holes overhead and then down into the water. Instead of seeing her reflection, she saw three reflections: one of herself as a young girl, another as a toddler, and a final one as a baby. How can this be? she wondered. She waved at the reflections; all three waved back. This is impossible, she thought. All three reflections mirrored her look of shock.
She reached down towards the little girl’s reflection, the girl’s hand reaching out towards hers. Molly’s hand touched the pool’s surface and began to glow like the water. The glow spread from her hand to her entire body. She screamed and yanked her hand away from the water, falling onto her back.
The glow faded a minute later. As Molly sat up, something felt different. She touched the back of her head to find her hair shorter. She put a hand to her chest to find her breasts reduced to mere bumps. When she stood up, the hem of her dress overlapped the ground by a good two inches. She shuffled forward a step in her loose shoes to kneel down at the surface of the pool.
This time she saw only two reflections in the water. The toddler and the infant looked back at her. The little girl had disappeared. She stared at the water a moment before the stark realization came: she was the little girl now. “No,” she said, her voice now higher. “I’m not. I can’t be. This can’t be happening.” She burst from the cave, running towards home to find the only man capable of helping her.
Chapter 19: Extermination
Veronica swept the shelf clean in frustration. Hammers, nails, and screws crashed to the floor of the tool shed. She held out her arm, the pale, chubby limb a reminder of the sacrifices she had made over the last three years. All for nothing now, she thought.
Three years of manipulating the pieces into place, waiting for the perfect time to strike. She had earned Samantha’s trust, enduring three years of that bitch ordering her around and tucking her in at night. At the same time she convinced David to help her overthrow Samantha and assuaged Molly’s fears. She discovered the formula for the Indian potion to erase the children’s memories in Joseph’s bedroom, smuggling the recipe back to Eternity inside one of Molly’s dolls. She and Molly then brewed the formula in secret at night and tested it on Annie until they got it right. After Samantha and her friends left for Seabrooke this final time, Veronica and David filled buckets with water from the Fountain of Youth.
Everything orchestrated with the precision of a military campaign and carried out successfully. They spiked the children’s juice at breakfast with the water and memory-altering potion. She had stood at one end of the dining hall, watching those brats Helena and Phyllis shrink into five-year-olds bawling for their mommas. Grabbing them by the ears and tossing them into the pantry cellar gave her a taste of the joy to come when she traveled to Seabrooke.
At the time she thought God must have been rewarding her for all the years of patience. There Samantha lay passed out on the docks, dead to the world. The temptation to grab David’s knife and plunge it into the traitor’s heart paralyzed her for a few moments. But she didn’t want to kill the wretch like this, not after thirty-five years of waiting. No, she wanted Samantha to suffer, to be broken and destroyed.
It had happened so much easier than she thought possible. Not more than three hours after waking up as a toddler, Samantha’s mind snapped. One glimpse of herself in the mirror in those cutesy-pie clothes and with those ridiculous curls reduced her to a simpering child.
Veronica took on her new role as her enemy’s mother with glee. Every time the baby called her “Mama Veronica” she resisted the urge to laugh with triumph. What better and more thorough humiliation for the traitor could she ever hope for? Best of all, with the fountain water and the memory-altering potion at her disposal, she could keep Samantha in that state for years or even centuries. The very thought of the bitch still wearing those cutesy-pie clothes three hundred years from now and still calling her “Mama Veronica” gave her an almost orgasmic thrill.
Then with everything going so well, everything all the sudden went wrong. Samantha and her little friends ran off in the night. David tracked them to the fountain cave, where the brats fell into the pool and disappeared. Vanished in a flash of red light, David told her. Along with them her hopes of completing her revenge.
It’s not fair, Veronica thought. After thirty-five years for Samantha to die because of some algae pained Veronica like a knife to the gut. Her ultimate triumph stolen by plants! Those same plants laid waste to her plans for Grandpa Jonas’s island. With only a quart of the precious water remaining, she might live for a century or even two if she rationed it well, but she wouldn’t have any to spare. Her plans to eventually sell the water for millions—billions even!—to vain women seeking to be young forever were dashed by that fucking algae.
There had to be some way to get rid of the shit. She threw aside rakes, scythes, and hoes in search of something that could dissolve the algae. Nothing in here could bring back Samantha so that Veronica might yet have her ultimate victory, but at least the rest of her plan might come to fruition. She pushed aside a bag of seeds and fertilizer. “Haven’t you people heard of pesticide?” she shouted.
“It’s not in here,” David said from the doorway.
“Then where the hell is it?”
“In the barn, locked up. Samantha didn’t want any of the little ones getting into it and poisoning themselves.”
“Go get it. As much as you can carry.”
“You think some bug spray is going to kill that?”
“You have a better idea?”
“I was thinking to burn the shit off,” David said.
Veronica crossed the tool shed, getting up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. “You always did think big,” she said. “Let’s grab a drum of cooking oil from the pantry then. That should be enough to do it.”
As they walked back along the trail into town, he said, “You should be glad. She’s gone, just like you wanted.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Veronica said.
“What did she do to you that was so bad you’d hate her for so long?” he asked.
“She betrayed me,” Veronica said. “That’s all you need to know.” She kicked at the dirt with one of her stubby hooves. All she had to look forward to now was being trapped in this flabby body, going through puberty over again on this stinking rock with this oaf David, mousy little Molly, and the other brats. I ought to kill them all the first chance I get, she thought. But first she had to get rid of that fucking algae.
She opened the door to the pantry cellar, a shaft of light falling onto Helena and Phyllis huddled together on the floor. “Have you come to let us out?” Helena asked.
�
��No. You two stay here until I need you,” Veronica said.
“But—”
Veronica slapped Helena across her grubby face. The little girl’s eyes welled up with tears. “I hope you learned your lesson. Don’t question me again.” She turned to David. “Grab one of those barrels and let’s go.”
Helena pressed herself against Phyllis to muffle her sobs. Veronica felt a moment of pity until she remembered the night she spent on this same floor three years ago thanks to Helena and Phyllis. Maybe she did have something else to look forward to even without Samantha.
She left the two girls curled up on the floor, following David through town. Some of the children broke off from a game of tag to fall in next to Veronica and David. “What’s that?” a boy asked. “Where are you going?” a girl asked. “Can I go?” another girl asked.
“Out of the way, kids,” Veronica said. “We have important things to do. We’ll be back later.”
“Can’t we come?” one of the girls asked.
“No.” The children continued to follow along, pestering them with questions. “Don’t you brats have chores to do? Go get to work before I smack you.”
The children flinched in unison and then scurried away. “Don’t you think you’re being hard on them? They’re too little to know any better,” David said.
“I don’t care. Coddling them is Molly’s job. Let’s hurry up and get this over with.” As they continued towards the cave, Veronica thought of what to do with the children now. Unless they got rid of the algae, she would need them to work the land as they had done under Reverend Crane. At least until she was old enough to return to civilization. The hell with them after that, she thought. She might burn the whole fucking island up at that point. And if this did work, she might throw the whole lot in after Samantha.
Veronica entered the cave, red light bouncing off the walls, mocking her. The red algae still topped the pool; if anything it seemed thicker than she remembered it earlier. “You’re going to get yours,” she said. “Dump it in.”
“Here goes nothing,” David said. He opened the barrel of cooking oil and dumped it into the water. The grease coated the surface of the water, mixing in with the algae. David took a box of matches from his pocket. “Stand back,” he said before lighting the match.
Veronica stood against the wall as a wave of flame washed over the fountain. The fire burned for ten seconds and then fizzled. “Well?” she said to David.
He crept over to the edge of the fountain, peering down. “What the hell—” he began, but never finished. A blob of algae leapt from the water, attaching itself to his face. He screamed as the algae began to pulse with angry red light. “Help me!”
“How?” Veronica said. David wiped furiously at the algae, but it only spread across his body, the glow becoming even brighter. He let out one last horrible wail and then collapsed to the ground.
The algae oozed off him, returning to the Fountain of Youth. In its place, David lay unmoving, his body charred from head to toe. Bile rose up in Veronica’s throat. “Holy shit,” she said. The algae continued to pulse with light in the fountain, sounding a warning to her.
“This isn’t over,” she said. Then she slid along the cave wall and ran.
Chapter 20: St. John’s
The little plane rattled and bucked, Samantha’s stomach doing the same. “Sorry,” the pilot shouted from the seat next to her. “A little turbulence.”
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Vermont, I think. Might be Canada.”
“You think?”
“The navigation stuff is messed up, but I’ll find it.”
“Right.” Or we’ll run out of gas and crash, Samantha thought. She should have found a more experienced pilot instead of this boy half her age who didn’t even need to shave yet, but she didn’t have a lot of choices at the airport. Her only other choice had been to fly the plane herself, guaranteeing a crash.
After stealing a car to escape from Chicago, Samantha knew her comrades in the Bureau would have all the major airports, bus stations, and train stations for a hundred miles covered. They hadn’t thought to cover a remote airport in Indiana—no more than a single hangar and a strip of asphalt—where she bribed the young man behind the controls with a combination of money, cleavage, and a kiss on the cheek.
“Have you ever been here before?” she asked.
“Oh sure. My dad used to fly us to Cape Cod for Fourth of July,” the pilot said. “Sometimes he let me co-pilot.”
“When was the last time you were here?”
“About ten years ago, before the accident.”
“The accident?”
“His plane went down in a field in Ohio. Not his fault. The engine went out on him. Some defective part or something. We got a big settlement from the manufacturer. That’s how I’m able to keep this baby.”
“That’s great,” she said. She watched the engine out the window, waiting for it to spew smoke or sputter and die. I’m not going to make it, she thought.
If the killer had taken a commercial flight, then she was probably already in New Hampshire. The victim would already be dead when Samantha arrived, another murder the FBI would accuse her of committing. The only way to clear her name now was to find the woman from the lobby.
Clear her name. She didn’t even know her name anymore. Mr. Herschowitz and Andre had called her Jackie at the prom. Jackie what? She couldn’t remember. Was that her real name or did she have a third name or even more than that? Maybe she’d been a con artist with a whole slate of identities, the latest being Special Agent Samantha Young of Dallas, Texas.
“Are you all right? Do you need to puke?” the pilot asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. She reached into her jacket for the brochure taken from Herschowitz’s room. The St. John’s Senior Community had been a former prep school purchased and refurbished five years ago with state of the art facilities for today’s active senior, according to the brochure. She flipped through pictures of smiling oldsters playing tennis and horseshoes and walking along the vast green lawn. She superimposed her face and Andre’s over every couple, imagining them one day retiring to such a place after all the children grew up and left home.
No, that couldn’t happen. She was a fugitive from the FBI, wanted for three murders and he was gone. Disappeared somewhere, sometime as though falling through a bottomless pit in her memory. How could she have forgotten him? How could her mind misplace someone she had loved so much? Maybe the old folk’s home in New Hampshire would give her an answer.
On the back of the brochure she found something she hadn’t noticed in her hurry to escape from Hershowitz’s room. Beneath the phone number, the killer had underlined three digits: 2207. That must be a room number, Samantha thought. She wants to make sure I find whoever lives there.
What kind of sick game is this? she wondered. What kind of twisted mind would do this? Samantha must have done something terrible to this woman to drive her to commit these murders.
A scenario played out in her mind. Stacey, Andre’s former girlfriend, wanted to get revenge for stealing her man. But why wait over twenty years, after Samantha lost Andre? That couldn’t be the solution. There must be another reason, one hidden by her faulty memory.
“We’re almost there,” the pilot said. The plane began to descend closer to the trees below until Samantha braced herself for the inevitable crash. The little plane skimmed over the trees and a field of black cows roaming a pasture.
Past a barn lay a strip of asphalt like the one in Indiana. The plane came down on the asphalt hard enough that Samantha had to brace herself against the instrument panel to keep from smashing into the windshield. The young pilot whooped as he brought the plane to a stop. “Well, you know what they say about landings,” he said.
“What?”
“Never mind. We’re here. St. John’s, New Hampshire. After you get done visiting your grandma, maybe you and I could have dinner? I’ve got to fuel up and start back in a
few hours, but I’m sure we could—”
“Sounds good. You find somewhere and I’ll meet you.”
“But how—”
“It’s a small town. I’ll find you.” She kissed the pilot on the cheek and left him blushing in the cockpit. The tiny airport didn’t have a rental car agency, but a farmer promised to give her a ride in his pick-up truck.
“Going up to the home?” he asked as he started the truck.
“Yes. My grandmother hasn’t been feeling well. I thought maybe a visit would cheer her up,” Samantha said.
“Couldn’t hurt. We don’t get so many visitors now that the school closed. Whereabouts you from?”
“Dallas.”
“That’s a long ways. You must be tired. If you’re looking for a place to stay, my wife and I have a room to rent.”
“I’m not planning to stay very long,” she said, though the idea of a bed in a quiet farmhouse appealed to her after over a day without sleep. After she stopped the killer she would have plenty of time to rest. He gave her a phone number in case she changed her mind and then dropped her at the front gates of the St. John’s Senior Community.
The rusty gates were open enough for her to walk through, up a pothole-laden path to a brick house coated in ivy. Over a bronze plaque that had probably once given the name of the prep school, someone had posted a plywood sign with ‘St. Johns Senior Comm’ printed in spray paint. A laminated paper sign beneath this instructed her to ring the doorbell.
She waited a minute at the door before a thin woman in a nurse’s uniform appeared in the doorway. The nurse trembled as if a cold wind were blowing. “Can I help you?” she asked, her voice little more than a breeze.
“I’m here to see a patient,” Samantha said.
“We don’t have any patients. The hospital is down the road in Meyersville,” the nurse said.
Children of Eternity Omnibus Page 70
