The Influence

by Bentley Little

  Why? Jill wondered.

  It was not a question worth answering. It was what she wanted to do, what she needed to do, and what she would do.

  Jill knew she should call Ross and tell him where she was, but she didn’t dare because she didn’t want it to know. This way was safer, and she would stay here until…until…until she didn’t need to anymore.

  She got back into the van.

  And continued up the road to the next town, where she bought her paints and paper before heading back to the reservoir.

  THIRTY FOUR

  Dave had been after her to go back to Magdalena, if only to check on their property and their animals—“We can’t stay away forever,” he said—but although Lita worried about the fate of her horse and wondered if Jackass was even still taking care of the ranch for them, she agreed with Ross: she would only go back when it was proved to her that that monster was gone.

  Unfortunately, she had not been able to contact any of her friends in Magdalena to find out what was happening. For all she knew, they had left, too. But if that were the case, their cell phones and email should have worked—and they didn’t. Her gut told her that things were worse now than they had been when she’d left, though there was no way to know one way or the other.

  Her dad was still missing, and it was getting harder and harder to tell herself that there was nothing sinister in that. No one had any clue as to his whereabouts, the police were apparently stymied in their investigation, and it took every last ounce of hope and optimism she had in order to convince herself that he was not dead.

  And that it was not connected to the angel.

  The monster.

  Dave, too, had been trying to get ahold of people back in Magdalena, and when he finally did get through to Jackass, the news was not good. The handyman said that over half the population of the town and surrounding area had fled, and that of the ones who remained, many were holed up, survivalist style, in barricaded houses filled with guns and supplies.

  Some had changed.

  They talked for a few moments, before Dave handed the phone to Lita.

  “What about our place?” she asked after a quick greeting. “How’s Mickey?”

  There was a short pause, while Jackass obviously tried to decide what and how much he should say. He opted for the vague and simple, “He ain’t Mickey no more.”

  Lita felt as though she’d been kicked in the chest, as though she’d had a hole punched through her heart, but she quickly decided that she didn’t want to know the details. She was silent for a moment. “Get out of there,” she told him finally.

  “As soon as I get the rest of my gold, I’m off for better climes,” he promised.

  “You should go now.”

  “I’m bein’ left alone so far. As long as my luck holds out…”

  “Luck changes,” she said. “That’s what it does.”

  “I know. And at the first sign, I’m outta here.” He sounded apologetic. “But there’s a lot a gold, Lita. And after all this time of everyone thinkin’ I’m crazy…”

  “You don’t still think that angel’s protecting you, do you?”

  “No, but a lot of people are protectin’ the angel now. At least that’s what I hear.” For the first time, there was a hint of fear in his voice. “They’re waitin’ for it to arise.”

  A chill caressed her spine. “Did the sheriff ever come out there?” she asked. “Or any priests or anyone from the Catholic church?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  She’d been afraid of that, though she didn’t see how it was possible. Several people had gone to the sheriff’s office, Ross and Dave had both phoned, and the sheriff had to send someone out to at least take a look at what was happening in Magdalena.

  Of course…

  It was powerful. She remembered the mob that had been gathering in front of the market before they left town, seeing in her mind the man with the pig nose, the suddenly youthful Ben Stanard. Anything that could do that could certainly exert a little influence over local law enforcement.

  In a way, that was what scared her the most: how easy it was for the institutions of society to break down, how quickly Magdalena could be so completely cut off from the rest of the world. It made her realize that things like this could be happening all the time in small out-of-the-way locales without anyone in the wider world being the wiser.

  “Get out of there,” she told the handyman again.

  “I will,” he said. “Soon.”

  After that call, she and Dave were both depressed. They were glad to be away from Magdalena but felt guilty that they’d run away without doing anything to stop the horrors that were occurring there. It was the uncertainty of the future, however, that weighed heaviest upon them. His parents were dead, her mom was dead, her dad was missing…what would come next? How far did those tentacles reach?

  Dave was no longer suggesting that they return to Magdalena, but neither of them wanted to live indefinitely in her mom’s house here in Albuquerque, either. Their lives were on hold, everything was up in the air, and it left them feeling completely unsettled.

  They had finished sorting through most of her mom’s belongings, separating the things they were going to sell from those having sentimental value that Lita wanted to save. Originally, she’d planned to have a big garage sale, but they decided to do what they’d done with Dave’s parents’ possessions and have someone come in and buy the whole estate, so until they figured out where they were going to live, she needed to find a cheap storage unit to hold everything she planned to keep.

  Her eyes alighted on a small unicorn of curlicued glass that was lying on top of a box of knickknacks. She remembered when she bought that unicorn for her mom at a glass-blower’s shop in Scottsdale. She’d been ten, and her dad had brought her back to the shop after dropping her mom and her aunt off at Los Arcos Mall. She’d given the object to her mom for Christmas, and Lita was both touched and surprised that she’d kept it all these years.

  She picked up the unicorn, her eyes tearing up.

  Maybe their luck would change again, Lita thought.

  Although she wasn’t sure if she really wanted that. She didn’t want anyone she knew to die, but at the same time, there were a thousand different ways that their lives could be affected by a slight change of fortune. Their car could have a dead battery, which would make them stay home instead of going to the grocery store as planned, and because they didn’t go to the store, they would be home when a robber tried to break into her mom’s house, and, upon seeing them, the robber could break out his gun and start shooting...

  Her mind instantly came up with a dozen such scenarios, but Lita immediately pushed them all from her mind, not wanting to consider any of them.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she told Dave. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She tripped on the way. She was not a clumsy person; in fact, she had always been athletic and very well coordinated. But she stumbled over a wrinkle in the hallway carpeting, and instead of instantly righting herself, the way she would ordinarily, her left foot, already in mid-step, smashed into the back of her right ankle, and she pitched forward, arms flailing. In the brief second before her forehead connected with the corner of the table that her mother, for some inexplicable reason, had placed in the hallway, a single thought flashed through her mind:

  Her luck had run out.

  ****

  Dave called Ross from the hospital and told him what had happened.

  “She’s still unconscious, but she’s stable. You don’t need to come out here,” he added quickly.

  “I’m coming.”

  “No. I don’t want you to. Lita wouldn’t want you to.”

  “Why?”

  “Something…might happen.” There was no need to go into more detail. He knew that Ross knew what he was talking about. “You and Jill just stay there.”

  “Jill’s gone,” Ross said.

  “What do you mean she’s gone?”
<
br />   “I came home from work yesterday and she wasn’t here. She didn’t come back last night, and I haven’t heard from her.” There was a pause. “I think she might’ve gone back to Magdalena.”

  “Have you tried—”

  “I’ve tried everything.”

  “It could be something else. Are you guys having problems? You know, she might not be used to California…”

  “She wouldn’t just run off without telling me. Not if it was something normal. Besides, her van’s gone, but she didn’t take any of her stuff. Not even clothes.”

  “Did you tell the police? Maybe she’s been kidnapped.” Dave knew he was reaching for rational answers, but he didn’t want to go where he knew this was headed.

  “It’s that monster in Magdalena,” Ross said. “We both know it.”

  Yes, he did know it. Not logically, in his head, but where it counted, in his gut. He recalled the power he had felt in Cameron’s smokehouse, thought of Father Ramos describing how the angel would be reborn. It seemed highly unlikely that whatever it was would be contained in Magdalena.

  Why had they left in the first place without first destroying that thing?

  And what the hell was it?

  Dave looked over at Lita’s unmoving form and was suddenly filled with rage, an emotion that felt purifyingly welcome after the numbness of the past six hours. “I’m going back,” he vowed. “I’m going to get rid of that angel, and put an end to this once and for all.”

  “No,” Ross said, and Dave heard an authority and seriousness of purpose in the other man’s voice that he hadn’t before. “You stay with Lita. I’ll go back.”

  “Ross—”

  “I know what to do. I can get it done.”

  “We’ll both go.”

  “No,” Ross repeated. “Lita needs you. Stay with her.”

  He spoke a thought that had been floating around in the back of his mind but until now had remained unspoken. “What if I do something to her? What if it makes me tear out the tubes she’s hooked up to…or…or smother her with a pillow, or…?”

  “That’s not going to happen, Dave. And you’re safer in Albuquerque than you would be in Magdalena. You both are.”

  It was true, but he felt cowardly for even thinking it. “You can’t go after that thing yourself. It won’t let you. Jorge and his men are there, and who knows what defenses it’s built up since we left? You need me.”

  “I don’t. I told you, I have a plan. And I won’t be doing it all myself. You just take care of my cousin.”

  Dave’s mind was suddenly filled with an extraordinarily clear and extremely unwelcome vision. “Tell me the truth,” he said. “Did you fuck her?”

  Ross was brought up short. “What?”

  “Lita. Did you fuck her? I know you wanted to.”

  “That’s crazy!” The emotion in the denial was not as outraged as the words were. In fact, Dave thought, it wasn’t really a denial.

  “Did you?” he pressed.

  “Of course not!” Was he protesting too much? “This is exactly what I mean. It’s getting to you already. In New Mexico. Do you know what would happen if you went back?”

  He took a deep breath. Ross was right. “This is exactly what I mean,” he said. “What if I do something to hurt her?”

  “Do what you need to do, then. Stay away from the hospital if it makes you feel better. But you two need to keep away from Magdalena.”

  Unwelcome images were still flashing through his brain—

  Lita on her knees in front of her naked, erect cousin

  —but Dave ignored them. “We shouldn’t have left,” he said. “We should have stayed and taken care of things.”

  “We should have,” Ross agreed. “But maybe it wasn’t our decision to leave in the first place. Maybe we just thought it was.”

  “Then what makes you think you can fight it now?”

  “I don’t know. But I do. I’m going back there, and I’m going to kill that monster again, and this time there won’t be any resurrection.”

  Dave believed him, and he looked again at Lita’s unmoving form and for the first time in a long while felt the faint stirrings of an unfamiliar emotion: hope.

  THIRTY FIVE

  Intending to take out his suitcase, Ross opened the door of the closet and found himself looking at Jill’s clothes, still on their hangers in all of their multicolored splendor.

  He stared at them, wondering if she was dead.

  No!

  As terrible as the thought was, he had to admit to himself that it was a possibility, and though a fire had already been lit beneath him about returning to Magdalena, this fanned those flames into a conflagration. Quickly, he dragged out his suitcase, pulled a couple of shirts out of the closet, grabbed some socks and underwear from the dresser.

  He’d told Dave that he knew what he needed to do, and he did. Despite his false bravado, he wasn’t sure if he could arrange it, wasn’t even sure it would work, but the basic idea was sound, and the fact that it used the monster’s own powers against it gave him a feeling of satisfaction. Karma was a bitch.

  Even if it didn’t exist.

  He thought about Lita, lying unconscious in a New Mexico hospital, and that made him hurry even faster.

  Did you fuck her?

  Dave’s question had hit him hard. His answer had been honest—he hadn’t had sex with his cousin—but he couldn’t deny that he had thought about it, and the knowledge made him feel both guilty and disgusted with himself.

  Although he was fairly certain that those thoughts would not have occurred to him had not that creature been shot out of the sky.

  Ross tried to recall exactly what he had seen Christmas night, when that thing had flown over the ranch, tried to reconstruct in his mind the feelings he had experienced at that moment, but so much had happened since then that his memories and attitudes were all jumbled together. Although he couldn’t say for sure what it had looked like when it was alive, he clearly recalled the way it had appeared in the shed, curled into a fetal position, rotting, its flesh melting, its terrifying face filled with a horrible malevolence, and he felt once again the strength of the power that had enveloped him, that had made him believe for a few moments that it really was an angel.

  It had influenced him there, and its effects were still following him, not merely following him but spreading, touching those he touched, and he understood now that the only way to put a stop to it all was to destroy the body once and for all. He had tried calling the Cochise County sheriff’s department to determine whether any efforts had been made to do that, had tried calling the Tucson diocese of the Catholic church and asking for Father Ramos, to see if they were doing anything, but both inquiries led nowhere. As far as he could ascertain, the sheriff’s office had sent no one out to investigate, and Father Ramos appeared to be persona non grata with the church.

  Wanting some intel on the ground, he had gotten Jackass McDaniel’s number from Dave, and when the handyman answered the phone, he told Ross that he was packing, getting ready to leave. “I’m done here,” he said. “I’m out.”

  “What happened?” Ross asked, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “What hasn’t happened?”

  “I mean, what made you decide to leave now?”

  “My gold turned to shit.” His voice rose. “My gold turned to shit. All the nuggets I dug out are now little pieces a smelly dog crap.”

  “I’m coming back,” Ross said.

  “Oh no. Don’t do that.” He could hear the concern in McDaniels’ voice.

  “I’m going to get rid of that thing.”

  “The angel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Other people’ve already tried,” McDaniels said. “But it protects itself. Everyone who’s gone after it’s gotten killed, one way or another.” He paused. “You ain’t gettin’ through, either.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Oh yeah. I went out there with Hec the other day. He was
a sharpshooter in Iraq, and his wife, Hannah, was kinda attacked by somethin’ in her garden, so he had the same thought you did, cut it off at the head. We went out to Holt’s place, but the road’s all dug up and I think booby trapped, so we snuck in through the east side, through Shel Dilson’s land—Shel’s family’s gone; they took off around the same time you did—and we found it, the angel. It’s bigger now. Holt’s shed’s not there anymore, and that thing’s out in the open, and we saw it.” McDaniels took a deep breath. “It’s…different. It’s turned into somethin’ else, somethin’ new.”

  Ross thought of Jill’s paintings. “Like an egg?” he asked.

  “Yeah. And I think it’s ready to hatch.”

  “You said your friend was a sharpshooter. Did he miss?”

  “He didn’t even try to shoot at it. It was too damn scary. We just slunk off. Holt was there, though. We saw him. Him and a bunch a guards. They’re watchin’ out for it, makin’ sure nothin’ disturbs it until it’s out.”

  “Well, I’m coming over there,” Ross said.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “You sound sure a yourself, like you know somethin’ the rest of us don’t.”

  “I have a plan,” Ross admitted.

  McDaniels was silent for a moment. “Could you use another hand?”

  “Of course! But I don’t want to trick you into thinking—”

  “You’re not trickin’ me into shit. This is my home. I don’t wanna leave it. I was only goin’ cuz I thought I had to. But if you got a plan, I’m in. We need to stop this sucker now while we still can, before it hatches all the way.”