by Heath, Jack
"What happened to you back at the Killing Fields?"
"You know what happened," John snapped. "I was invaded by spirits. I don't know how many—hundreds of thousands, maybe millions—and they screamed and cried, and I couldn't stand it."
"And what stopped the screaming?"
John looked at her, feeling his anger and resentment and self-pity all bubbling up and mixing together, and knowing them for exactly what they were, but feeling that he richly deserved to feel that way. "She was there and she forced me to touch the skulls."
"Rebecca?"
John nodded.
"She forced you?"
John pressed his lips together in anger, but finally he said. "She made me trust that it was the right thing to do."
Amy nodded. "I thought it was her. I felt something there."
"I'm tired of trusting, Amy. I've spent my life digging up the facts, and I need to find the facts here."
"What if there are no facts? What if there are just a bunch of beliefs in an un-provable God or gods or Superior Being, and what if those beliefs are all different except in one thing, and that is that they believe in the sanctity of life and in the positive direction of the universe? In other words, they believe in creation and the possibility of love and compassion, as opposed to destruction and hatred. What if that's all you can get?"
"There still have to be people in charge. There's money for a jet, so there has to be some kind of organization."
"What if it's just a few anonymous donors and a loose, informal gathering of like-minded people?"
John shook his head. "I don't believe it. I've never seen anything like that in my life."
"Maybe there's a first time for everything."
John shrugged. Maybe she was right, but part of him cried out for some kind of answer, some sense the bottom line where he was dealing with facts as opposed to supposition and belief. He felt a terrible blast of loneliness, but in the absence of something he could prove to himself, some hard base on which he could sustain a belief in the rational aspects of everything he was doing, he ultimately preferred solitude. "That's not good enough," he said after a few seconds.
He closed his eyes, reclined his seat, and slept for several hours until the co-pilot touched his arm to wake him. "Excuse me, sir, but we'll be setting down in Abu Dhabi for refueling. Be on the ground about thirty minutes and then off again. Have to ask you to sit up and prepare for landing."
John sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked out the window at the sand-scorched Mideast flatness extending in all directions.
"I'll be getting off here, and there will be a new co-pilot for the last leg into London," the co-pilot said. "And we'll be bringing some food on board. Sandwiches or wraps, mainly, if you have any requests."
John shook his head. "I'll eat whatever you've got," he said, and felt the plane begin to lose altitude as it began its approach toward Abu Dhabi.
The jet came in for a gentle landing, and they waited in the baking heat for the fuel trucks to top off their tanks. The co-pilot got off, and a bearded man got on, bringing a cooler packed with sandwiches, as well as hummus, baba ghanoush, and fresh fruit.
John looked out the window as the plane began to taxi again, his thoughts turning bitter and ever inward. It seemed to him that the parched desert landscape of Abu Dhabi mirrored what he felt inside, his sense of emotional aridity, a feeling as if his connections with other people and even with himself had been scorched away. He felt isolated and untouchable in one sense, and in another as if his sense of self, his individuality had been completely subsumed by the spirits or souls that flowed into him almost like an unstoppable river churning into his mouth and down his throat, the volume impossible to contain and beyond measure yet still pouring into him and into him alone and yet somehow being contained.
As they reached the end of the runway and moved into position for takeoff, Amy touched his arm. "John?" she said.
He turned to look at her, and whatever she saw in his eyes seemed to be all the answer she needed. She pulled her hand away as if she had been burned and turned to look out the opposite window. John looked at her for another second and thought he could see the shiny track of a tear as it slid from her eye and ran down her cheek.
CHAPTER FORTY
JOHN SLEPT FOR ANOTHER THREE OR FOUR hours, and woke up again when the new co-pilot tapped him on the arm. "Food, sir?" the man asked, holding out a couple of sandwiches.
John stretched. "How much more time to London?"
"About two hours."
John took one of the sandwiches that was labeled chicken salad. "Thank you," he said as he tore off the wrapping and took a big bite. He took a bag of chips from a proffered basket and also a Diet Coke. As soon as he started eating he realized how hungry he had been and quickly wolfed down the sandwich and the bag of chips.
Amy was sleeping, so he stood up to stretch his legs, went to the bathroom, and on his way back decided to go up to the cockpit. As he started walking in that direction he felt a sudden lethargy, and his body seemed very heavy. He wondered if he'd been sitting on the plane so long that he'd developed a blood clot. It seemed hard to think suddenly, but his brain told him that a blood clot would not make him sleepy.
He went to the cockpit door and pushed it open, needing to tell the pilot that he was feeling strangely ill. When he looked at the back of the pilot's head, at first it made no sense. He saw the small hole in the man's skull and the trickle of blood that ran down to his collar and that had spread along his shoulder and dripped on to floor.
He blinked hard several times thinking his brain wasn't working right because he couldn't be seeing this. He looked over at the co-pilot who had turned to glance over his shoulder.
"Wha—" John said. He was trying to get the question out of his mouth, but his lips and tongue felt like they were covered with glue. "What issss?" he said again, hearing the words slur.
"Change of plans," the pilot said. "Go sit down before you fall down."
John closed his eyes for just a second, but when he opened them again he was sitting on the floor looking up at the copilot. He shook his head trying to clear it, wanting to tell the man that he had expected the Coven to make its move and that he had known that somehow this was supposed to happen, but before he could even try to form a sentence in his mind everything went dark.
He woke up sometime later in the back of a vehicle of some type. His throat was parched, and he had a splitting headache as if he was coming off a very long bender and was horribly hung-over. He felt the road rocking beneath him, heard the bump of tires hitting rough spots in the road. The co-pilot was looking down at him with a placid expression.
"Welcome to England," he said as he brought a hypodermic syringe into sight and stabbed it into John's arm. Darkness returned.
When he woke up a second time he was sitting upright. His head still pounded, his vision was blurred, and he had a sense of heaviness in his limbs as if he weighed hundreds of pounds. He was sitting at a table of some sort and he could make out the shapes of a number of other people facing him across the table.
He closed his eyes very slowly and opened them again, hoping to clear his vision, then he moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth trying to generate enough saliva to speak. "Jessica?" he said, his voice barely more than a whisper and as rough as a shoe being scraped across stones.
"Yes, John."
He closed his eyes again, tried to gauge the amount of drugs that had to be in his system. Some kind of serious tran-quilizer, he guessed. Every motion, every thought felt like it was being dredged through a vat of syrup.
"I guess you were expecting me," he whispered.
"We have known for some time you would show up here."
He nodded, trying without seeming to do so to test his arms and legs, determine how he was bound, and get a sense of whether he could fight the drugs in his system.
"And Sarah?" he rasped. "Is she here?"
"Sarah is sleeping, but she's just
fine, John."
"And Amy?"
"Amy is also fine."
He nodded, flexing his hands against the thick arm of a wooden chair, doing the same with his leg muscles, unable to move more than his fingers and toes. He was tightly bound to the arms and legs of the chair, and there were bindings around his chest, as well. They were taking no chances.
"Could I have a little water, please?"
Off to his right he heard someone stir. A chair leg scraped against a stone floor and a second later a straw was placed between his chapped lips. He sucked greedily until after only a few sips it was pulled away.
He swallowed, worked his jaw back and forth, tried to make his mind work against the drugs. "I met some of your friends in a men's room in the Phnom Penh airport," he said, his voice coming louder and stronger.
"That was inelegant on our part," Jessica said. "For what it's worth, I was against trying it."
"I seem to have been a terrible inconvenience."
"You have been a challenging opponent, John," Jessica Lodge said. "Actually, I have to congratulate you. A year or two ago I thought we were going to be able to check you off our list. After your wife's death, you seemed to be on your way to a life of alcoholism, and I hoped you would just slide quietly into ineptitude."
"Sorry to disappoint." He had been blinking his eyes slowly to try and clear them, and this time when he opened them he found he could actually make the out the room and the shape of the table and the faces. The room was elaborate, with ornate moldings along the ceiling, oil paintings on the walls, but windowless. It brought back terrible memories of the room in the catacombs beneath Salem, and for a moment he could feel the tickle of fear like a small fire starting deep in his belly.
The table was in the form of a hexagram, but instead of being pointed, each arm of the hexagram had a place for a person to sit. John occupied one of those spots, and he could see that each of the other points was also occupied. He looked first to his left and then right, seeing gray hair and erect carriage. They were strangers, but their tailored clothing, rich jewelry, and chiseled features identified them as individuals of wealth and power.
John blinked to clear his vision a bit more and finally moved his gaze directly across the table where he knew Jessica Lodge was sitting. He saw her sharing one of the points with a tall man with a full head of gray hair, a ramrod straight nose, strong chin, and regal bearing. Jessica's hair was carefully done, her gown appeared to be long and flowing, and a large sapphire at her throat gave her an almost queenly aura.
John looked at her and a tremor of anger replaced the fear he had felt just a moment earlier. Then he moved his eyes to Jessica's left and his breath caught in his throat. Sarah sat along one side of the point, also in a flowing gown, also with her hair up in a formal arrangement, her makeup carefully applied.
"Sarah," he said in a choked voice.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
SHE TURNED TO LOOK AT HIM, BUT HER GAZE was blank, lacking recognition, as if she was in a trance or as if she was a stranger who simply looked identical to his daughter.
"Sarah," he said again, hearing the beseeching tremor in his voice. She continued to look at him without any emotion, as implacable as a robot, and he realized she must either be drugged or under some kind of trance.
"What do you want?" he asked Jessica.
"John, you've always been so terribly intuitive. I think you know what we want."
"Well, I presume from the way those two men acted in the airport that you want me dead."
Jessica smiled at him. "See, I told you that you would get it."
"If you want me dead, why even bother with this seance? Why not just kill me?"
He caught the sideways glance Jessica shared with the man who sat beside her.
"We decided to give you one last chance to join us."
John snorted a laugh. "Would you believe me if I told you I'd had a change of heart?"
Jessica smiled and shook her head. "Probably not.
John's brain was still stuck in sludge, but his gut instinct told him he needed to play for time. He didn't have a clue how it was going to help him, but he also knew he had no other option. "So that doesn't really answer my question, does it? What is the point of having me here at this table? Why don't you just shoot me and get it over?"
Again he saw several of the people around the table cast glances at each other, as if this idea represented some kind of risk to them.
He had already started to suspect that in addition to slowing his mental reactions, another aspect of the drug he had been given was to dampen his emotional reactions. After all, he knew they were very close to killing him, but he couldn't seem to summon much in the way of either fear or rage.
"Enough," Jessica said. "It is time."
The man who was sitting beside her stood up and walked around the table until he stood directly behind John. At that point Jessica leaned forward and extended her arms to either side. One by one the people around the table reached out and clasped hands. John was relieved to see they bypassed Sarah, but they linked hands with the man standing right behind his chair.
Again John felt a tremor of fear in his stomach, but nothing more. In a small corner of his brain he realized he was about to be a passive bystander at his own execution. A second later another realization dawned: it wasn't going to be just him that died. Somehow, by giving them a place to escape into, he had brought freedom to countless spirits that had been held in some kind of ongoing torment for a very long time. If he let himself die, didn't he risk returning these spirits to the agony they had just escaped?
Across the table from where he sat, Jessica Lodge released herself from the chain of hands, stood, and fetched something from a side table behind her. She returned to the table with a bowl and brought it around to each set of joined hands. Dipping her hand into the bowl, she proceeded to draw an X on each set of hands with what John knew right away had to be human blood.
When she finished going around the table and each set of hands had a large X that touched each hand equally, she did the same thing to each of her hands and joined them again with the people to either side of her. When that was finished the man who had been standing behind John began to chant.
John paid no attention to the words because right away he became aware that the light in the room seemed to dim, and then a second later he realized it wasn't the light in the room but the light in the immediate circle that had grown darker. As the man behind John continued to chant, the others at the table also began to speak the words with him, and as they did the air within the circle of hands grew even darker.
As the air around him darkened, it also seemed to thicken, and John could feel his chest begin to strain as he tried to pull air into his lungs. His brain was still too muddy to put coherent thoughts together, but he knew he should feel panic. In some very small recess of his mind a faint voice was crying out, telling him he was going to die very soon if he didn't do something. Another part of his brain was trying to put together a question: why was the Coven doing this to him? Why not just cut his wrists and let him bleed to death in yet another of their blood sacrifices? There had to be a reason they were doing it this way, didn't there?
He was so sleepy and lethargic, and it was getting so terribly hard to breathe and even harder to summon the determination to fight it. But then in the next second he felt something touch his hand and it seemed as if a light had come on. He opened his eyes and saw Rebecca Nurse holding both of his hands in hers, and on either side of Rebecca, the line of beseeching faces, young, old, man, woman, thousands and thousands and millions of them, running into the distance.
Fight! a voice called out in his head, the tone blaringly loud and insistent. In that same instant, he began to look into the eyes of the other spirits, spirits that had been imprisoned at Auschwitz and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and he saw their hope and their fear, and he felt their pain. The face of a little girl looked up at him, and the wrinkled face of a nearly
toothless old woman and a young mother holding a baby to her breast, and in that blinding instant he knew their stories as he knew his own. They exploded inside him like a bomb, and with immediate shattering revelation he knew the hopes and dreams and aspirations that had been savagely cut short; he knew their loves and their hatreds and their fears, and he knew their fear of his failure was the one thing that united each and every one of them at that moment.
Fight! The word came again like an irresistible wall of will, and he felt Rebecca Nurse's hands squeeze his until what felt like a shot of adrenaline exploded through them and into his veins. As all of this was happening, John was aware that he hadn't moved. He realized that to anyone watching him the change was absolutely imperceptible, but his mind was starting to work again.
He focused on the first thing he needed: air. The darkness inside the linked hands of the Coven was like a plastic bag over his head. He was suffocating and the darkness all around him was intensifying and hardening, and if he didn't find a way to breathe very quickly, he was going to pass out and die. John felt like he was in a separate universe, and then he realized that perhaps he was, that he couldn't breathe because he was being pulled into an eternal prison of cold and darkness and death.
He looked into Rebecca Nurse's eyes and then into the eyes of the nearest of the millions of spirits, and he sensed something there and realized he could draw upon it if he concentrated hard enough. His lungs were on fire, his body rebelling against the lack of oxygen. The darkness continued to harden around him, becoming a shell of impenetrable onyx, and John realized that in another few seconds it would be too late. If he didn't fight back he was going to die inside a crypt of darkness.
The eyes, he thought, screaming to himself, feeling the beginning of fear and panic and welcome rage as his mind fought the drugs and managed to kick back into high gear. The eyes.
He looked at the little girl, the old woman, the young mother, he looked at the boy beside her and the man beside him and the next three men and then a group of young girls, and in each set of eyes he caught a small glint of energy and hope, a small shred of determination to fight back. In every case it was a dim light, barely perceptible, but it still existed.
