Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  A low, guttural growl came from above, and Grove tried to look up when his fingers suddenly slipped.

  “Aahhhhh!”

  He bounced against the rock, then dangled there in the wind, hanging by one hand now—one, weakening, numbed hand! Gasping for breath, vertigo choking him, heart pounding, windburned vision blurring, he tried to look up. The gusts rose again, clawing at him, yanking at him. Time running out. His icy fingers slipping.

  The thing that was once Richard Ackerman, only inches away now, leaned out over the ledge. He reached for a second arrow. His face was clearly visible in the pale sunlight now. It was an abomination of a face, not really a face at all, more like a fleshy effigy, deformed by evil, eye sockets sunken like a rotten gourd, pupils glowing phosphorous yellow with some inextricable, parasitic will.

  Grove looked up at Ackerman—looked through the human eyes, into the demon’s eyes, into the abyss. And the abyss looked back. And Grove managed to lift his free hand—his posture and position taking on a decent approximation of the position in which all the victims had been found. One hand raised to the heavens. The summoning.

  The demon paused, cocking its distorted head in confusion. What is this?

  Grove was offering a trembling, frostbitten hand, begging for help. The great manhunter, begging for his life! The demon savored Grove’s last thoughts: Please don’t let me fall. I will take your hand. Please. I will take your hand, I will surrender to it if only you’ll help me.

  The Richard-Thing grinned, then reached a long, emaciated, blackened hand over the ledge.

  Grove reached up with his last scintilla of strength and grasped the hand of evil.

  30

  The Aperture

  “Come into me!” Grove howled with his final breath, and all at once the demon stiffened like a marionette charged with a million volts of electricity. The distended mouth dropped open for a moment, its rotten maw gaping impossibly wide, emitting a hellish shriek that shook the glacier like a depth charge . . . and then the black entity flowed into Grove.

  In that single terrible instant, very little of the transference was visible to the human eye.

  The only external evidence of the absorption was a spontaneous change in both Ackerman and Grove as if the two were on opposite sides of a great balance: Ackerman collapsed, and Grove inflated like an artificial rubber doll hanging in midair, the two frozen hands still clasped in paralytic symbiosis.

  The thing that entered Grove was a black, poisonous banshee. Grove convulsed. It felt as though a second skeleton were unfolding inside him, its bones made of obsidian, its marrow extracted from hell. Grove’s brain trembled with garbled soliloquies, Sumerian gibberish, horrible images popping and flickering—centuries of murder, ceaseless cruelties, rivers of human blood flooding the land, crashing in crimson tidal waves against the flimsy ramparts of men. And that’s when Grove played his final card.

  He let go.

  He plummeted nearly three hundred feet, his arms and legs flailing, his body convulsing and seizing in free fall like an insect in its angry death throes. The cry that came out of him was not of this earth, the Doppler effect changing pitch as he plunged, a demonic bellow that deepened into the sound of a hellish, enraged, baritone aria.

  The profiler landed in a capsule of snow with a muffled fuhhhmmp! that echoed faintly off the great steeples of rock and ice.

  Then there was nothing but silence.

  At the top of Mount Cairn’s east face, Ackerman lay dead, his savaged brain released at last.

  Hundreds of feet below, Grove lay buried in twelve feet of soft pack. The newborn sun slanted across the impact site. The crater was in the shape of a bat. Or an angel. Depending upon your point of view.

  Clinically dead under all that snow, yet clinging to the last embers of life, Special Agent Ulysses Grove felt a tremendous pressure at the base of his brain stem as he lay suspended in his white tomb of ice.

  It was an all-consuming impulse, a terrible compulsion that snaked through the tributaries of his circulatory system and kept him alive far beyond the limits of human survival.

  It was the urge to kill.

  Epilogue

  The Cabin

  “All is change; all yields its place and goes.”

  —Euripides

  Voices. In the dark. Muffled by the snow. Crunching sounds of machinery. Shovels. Helicopter rotors vibrating the glacier. Getting closer. Closer.

  Then a single male voice rang out as clear as a slap, shot through with urgency: “Found him! Over here! Let’s get a medivac down here stat! Stat!”

  The womb of snow trembled.

  He couldn’t move. Like the mummies of Anubis he had to wait in silent stasis for the course of mortal events to discover him. He felt a distant stirring in his chest. How long had he been under the snow? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Millennia?

  The darkness cracked open. Daylight pouring in. Gloved hands brushing away layers of powder.

  Eyes barely functioning, he could see the rescuers now: a half dozen men in ATF parkas digging him out of his cold white tomb. A paramedic with a trauma box—portable defibrillator, oxygen, traction splints, inflatable antishock trousers—burrowed down into the drift around him.

  A gloved hand reached down and grasped him by the lapel of his frozen jacket.

  “He’s alive! We got eyes blinking! Get the telemetry radio down here!”

  The digging quickened. Radios crackled. Voices yelled. The snap of an ammonia capsule by his nose. Through glazed eyes he tried to see the medic.

  “Agent Grove? Can you hear me?”

  He could not speak, could barely breathe. When did he fall? Only a few minutes ago? More men were working on him now. Pain seared his shoulder where the arrow had grazed his nape. Tremendous pressure on his chest now. A gurgling sound coming out of him. Cables looped across his legs. The medic—a young black man wearing a chopper helmet and goggles—fiddled with defib paddles. “Got a flat line! Gonna shock him! Everybody clear—clear! Okay, clear!”

  Whap!

  The jolt stiffened him, arching his back like a scorpion, and he gasped.

  “Got it back!”

  The snake slithered up through his brain, through his autonomic nerve center. The puppeteer took control of his tendons and muscle. The medic was still working on him, oblivious of the awakening, doing something with a hypodermic, when the snake struck.

  “Jesus Chrahhhh—”

  Grove’s hands, blackened with frostbite, wrapped around the paramedic’s neck.

  The young man let out a garbled cry, which only fed the thing inside Grove. Slender, dark, frostbitten fingers tightened around the poor medic’s Adam’s apple with the force of an iron drill press.

  The medic turned ashen, his gray tongue protruding, delicate threads of saliva puffing out of him on convulsive squalls of coughing. And deep within Grove’s brain, cocooned in a sheath of blackness, the real Grove watched in horror like a man bound and gagged in a dark room, watching a snuff film unspool on a distant screen. His hands were operating with a will of their own, lustily strangling the life out of the young man. Orgasmic pleasure spurted through Grove as the medic’s eyes bugged, and it was horrible, and wonderful, and terrifying, and erotic, all at the same time.

  Others descended on the scene. Grabbing the New Grove. Prying his frozen fingers off the medic. The pinch of a needle in Grove’s arm—a heavy sedative coursing into him. The puppeteer raged, a terrible bellowing scream coming out of Grove as the drug pressed down on him.

  His body flopped in the snow for a moment, stringers of blood staining the whiteness, arms flailing, spine seizing up, as the drug spread through him. Movements slowing. The light dwindling.

  Slowing.

  Dwindling.

  Until finally . . . darkness descended.

  One week after Harlan Simms and the joint tactical force from Alaska saved Ulysses Grove from the crevasse on Mount Cairn, a young woman passed through Washington National Airport unnoticed by
most of her fellow travelers. She wore jeans and a denim jacket, and she walked with the aid of a metal cane. Her milky blond hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and she held an unlit cigarette in anticipation of exiting the nonsmoking area.

  Outside the terminal, she immediately lit the cigarette and hailed a taxi.

  In the daylight, her wounds were more visible. Most of the bandages had come off the previous day during her brief visit to a clinic in San Francisco, but there were still scattered butterfly bandages across her arms, her left cheek, and under her blouse. She’d been through endless interrogations and interviews over the last week. She’d been told there would be scars. Some of them would likely be unseen, psychic scars. But for all practical purposes she was expected to fully recover.

  That’s not what she was worried about. Her own well-being was not what was making her nervous as she climbed into that airport cab, shoving her overnight bag across the rear seat and giving directions to the driver. She was worried about Grove. In awkward conversations over the past week—with both Tom Geisel of the bureau and Michael Okuda of the Schleimann Lab—Maura had learned the broad strokes of what had happened to the profiler.

  Apparently the tactical force had arrived at the Mount Cairn trailhead only minutes after Grove had embarked up the side of the mountain. They heard gunshots, and minutes later found Ackerman near the original burial site, dead of cardiac arrest. Not long after that, they found Grove buried in the snow, barely alive, ribs broken, a lung punctured, a deep wound in his neck where the arrow had grazed him, severe hypothermia threatening his life. Evidently, a hypothermic individual can appear dead—even diagnosed as clinically deceased—and still be revived.

  But the problem wasn’t physical. They managed to save Grove’s life—his wounds were surprisingly minimal thanks to the cushion of snow that had stopped his fall—but for some reason he had slipped into some kind of bizarre psychosis. Geisel wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say much about it. And Okuda seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Maura learned later that Okuda had gone into a drug rehab program after being so shaken by the bizarre turn of events. But everybody was being tight-lipped and secretive about Grove, as though he had become some kind of classified state secret. Even Vida was fairly cryptic over the phone. She told Maura that Grove had been moved two days ago to a remote cabin owned by Tom Geisel on the Shenandoah River about seventy miles west of Grove’s home in Arlington.

  En route, riding in the back of that rattling airport taxi, passing the verdant hills of former Civil War battlefields, Maura braced herself for what she might find at the cabin. She didn’t care anymore about the paperback rights to the Sun City story or her imminent promotion at Discover or all the raving and gushing old Chester Joyce had been lavishing on her at work.

  She just wanted Grove to be okay.

  At that precise moment, as Maura was brooding her way across the lush Virginia landscape, the final stages of an ancient rite were occurring in the woods west of Leesburg.

  In a cedar-planked room, its windows shuttered and closed off from the forest around it, three individuals had been sweating over the bed of a fourth for nearly forty-eight straight hours. By the afternoon of the second day, working without a break, eating and sleeping in shifts, the three practitioners finally saw a change.

  Vida had been hovering over her son, waving a smoking hank of ceremonial wheat, droning in Swahili the word for “out,” when it happened.

  “Nge—nge—nge—NGE! Nnn!”

  Grove jerked forward suddenly on the bed, the padded ropes and creaking frame barely containing him, his skivvies ragged with blood and bile, his neck wrapped in the bandages.

  Father Carrigan, who had been standing at the foot of the bed, calling out the familiar Catholic litany of exorcism—“the archangel Michael commands you!”—suddenly reared back in surprise, his glass vial of holy water flying out of his hand and shattering against the knotty pine wall behind him. Professor de Lourde, standing in the far corner of the room with a small, breadbox-sized digital video camera, his finely tailored dress shirt wrinkled and soaked through with perspiration, suddenly gaped, jaw dropping.

  The video camera slipped from his hand, falling to the floor, its lens cracking, which unfortunately made the documentation of what followed impossible.

  And what followed was a miracle.

  Or at least that’s what ran through Father Carrigan’s mind as he watched the transformation. On the other side of the bed, Vida stared wide-eyed at the change, interpreting the phenomena quite differently. In that amazing instant, she believed the gods had come down and helped her son perform the most powerful magic she had ever witnessed. In the far corner of the room, over the course of that same astonishing moment, Professor Moses de Lourde—ever the academic, ever cynical—instantly formulated a third opinion: he thought they were all crazy, and they were all seeing things. But that was part of the deal the threesome had struck when they convinced Tom Geisel to let them bring the psychotic Grove here to this remote cabin. Whatever happened, whatever the results, the three friends would all bring their own perspective and culture to the task of exorcising the demon inside Grove—Vida’s African mysticism, Father Carrigan’s Catholicism, and de Lourde’s benevolent skepticsm. But now, as they all watched the phenomena unfold, not a single one of them was certain of what they were seeing.

  The body on the bed—blackened, scarred, and savaged by demonic possession—had suddenly and spontaneously jerked upward into a semisitting position . . . and then something extraordinary happened. A second body—an astral body that appeared initially as pure white light—tore through the flesh of the first like a butterfly ripping out of its chrysalis. This second Grove lurched forward across the foot of the bed and tumbled to the floor.

  Then, just for an instant—an instant that would never be verified by video, and would never truly be believed by anyone who was not present that day—there were two Groves in that cabin: a blackened husk of the man on the bed, and a glistening, damp, exhausted version sprawled on the warped oak floor. And that’s when the final change occurred.

  The shell of the man on the bed began to dissolve before their eyes, the sound of an alien wind moaning through the cabin like a dying beast. The figure blurred and undulated for a moment, like a sculpture made of smoke, then began to whirl off the bed, a column of noxious gas, rising and swirling upward, penetrating the ceiling and then vanishing on a faint, torturous shriek.

  Thunder rumbled suddenly outside.

  Vida ran over to her son, kneeling down and taking him in her arms, as de Lourde and Carrigan both lurched instinctively over to the window. Through the grimy glass, they could see the gray sky above the treetops roiling like a cauldron. A black whirlpool—as deep and opaque as squid ink—shot upward from the roof of the cabin, darkening the horizon like black skeletal fingers clawing the heavens. De Lourde gasped, and Father Carrigan prayed.

  Lightning crackled and veined the sky, and the rains started.

  The sound of the rain was like a salve on the cabin, and de Lourde and Carrigan turned back to the room. Vida was still holding her boy. Grove had sagged in her arms, clad only in his boxer shorts and bloody bandages. He was still semiconscious, and he looked a little delirious. But he was alive, and he was whole, and he was back. He closed his eyes and clung to his mother and tried to breathe normally again. Nobody said anything for quite some time.

  The blessed sound of the rain filled the cabin.

  From that day forward Grove would hold on to a single memory of the exorcism. Alone inside the dark prison of his mind, shrouded in blackness, watching his own body flail and convulse, he had suddenly seen another hand reaching for him through the darkness, a familiar hand, a woman’s hand. It pierced the fog and reached down for him with graceful, slender fingers, inviting him to accept it, surrender to it, grasp it. A gold wedding ring shimmered on one of its fingers.

  Hannah’s hand.

  It was not the power of Father Carriga
n’s litany, or Vida’s ritual, or even de Lourde’s steadying presence that yanked Grove back to reality. In the end it was something far more intimate and secret that had ripped him from the moorings of evil, tearing him free of that terrible doppelganger. Hannah had come for him, her lovely caramel-skinned hand reaching across the years of grief.

  And Grove had gladly followed her out of the shadows.

  Hours later, after the storm had passed and a certain calm had returned to the woods, Vida’s dusky face appeared in the doorway of the cabin’s back room. “You got a visitor, mwana.”

  Grove sat in a bentwood rocker near the window, a country quilt across his lap, a pair of aluminum crutches canted against the jelly cabinet next to him. He had been absently paging though a Geisel family photo album, enjoying the simple, mindless pleasure of looking at pictures of grandkids at Thanksgiving dinners. Now he looked up and smiled at his mother.

  “Wanawake?” he said.

  Vida’s face broke into stunned delight. “Yes, it is a woman. Jinsi gani?”

  Grove grinned. “Um . . . labda . . . labda yumkini?”

  Vida chortled. “We will have to work on your Swahili. It is Miss County.”

  Grove rose, put the crutches under his arms, and shuffled over to a little oval mirror above a porcelain washbasin. Every labored breath brought a dull ache from his punctured lung and broken ribs. He wore a fresh undershirt and jeans, but he didn’t like his reflection: his face looked terrible. Like a brown rag that had been wrung dry. The bandage around his neck was stained a ghastly yellow. You really look like hell, old hoss.

  He sighed and slowly made his way out the door.

  Maura was waiting on the porch, staring out at the old gnarled chestnuts that stood sentry on the edge of Geisel’s property. The rain had lifted. The sun had broken through the gray clouds here and there, and the air smelled of pine and wet earth. But the distant horizon still hung black and laden with portents—as though the evil had diffused into the atmosphere only to start its long reconstitution.