Something Deadly

by Rachel Lee

Sitting on a burnt, broken column, he took in the dark, diamond-studded sweep of the Caribbean night. The air was fresh, free of human pollutants, perfumed faintly by exotic blossoms that bloomed only at night. Blossoms the names of which he could never remember.

  Except for one, a bloodred hibiscuslike bloom with a black center. He had no idea what its botanical name might be, but he knew what the locals called it: Annie's Heart.

  He almost snickered every time he thought of it, because it was a truly beautiful flower to his way of thinking. Yes, it bloomed only at night, and yes, it had a black center, but it was still beautiful.

  Annie must have been like that, he mused. A beautiful sensuous woman. How else had she manipulated so many men?

  He closed his eyes, and it was almost as if he could feel her touch, hear her murmurs.

  Yes. One hell of a woman.

  * * *

  Steve Chase stayed late in his office, drafting the Senate resolution that would close the schools early for the Christmas holidays. A precautionary measure. Late, but still a decisive act, never mind that a lot of kids had been yanked out by their parents after the Shippeys died, anyway.

  He was alone, working by the light of his computer and the green-shaded banker's lamp on his desk.

  There was something about the beauty of drafting a legal document that always pleased him. The precision of the language, the careful choice of words, so that there could be no possible misinterpretation. The organization for the sake of clarity, the detailed explanations in support.

  All of it pleased him, just as architecture pleased him. Details coalescing into a thing of beauty. It absorbed him as nothing else in his life did.

  A chilly breeze blew across the back of his neck, and he looked up crossly, annoyed at the disturbance. Had his secretary turned down the air conditioning again?

  She had an annoying habit of doing that, and he generally didn't notice it until after dark, when the sun no longer shone in his windows to warm him and his office.

  Another breath of coldness, this one seeming to wrap around him.

  Dammit.

  Rising from his computer, he went to the door leading to the outer office, where he could reset the thermostat. He would have to get severe with her again. More severe than last time.

  He flung the door wide, then stopped as he saw a shadow move in the dark outer office.

  "Camille?" he said, thinking it must be his secretary.

  Nothing answered him. The chill snaked over his neck again, reminding him of his irritation.

  "Dammit, I told you not turn the air down anymore. I'm freezing in there."

  The shadow moved again, looking like a woman's shape, but she didn't make a sound.

  Uncertainty began to grow. "Camille? If this is some kind of joke…" Reaching out, he flipped a switch, filling the room with bright light.

  But there was no one there.

  It took him exactly two strides to reach the outer door, and exactly three seconds to pass through it and lock it.

  He would finish that resolution in the morning.

  * * *

  Dec was deep in much needed sleep, dreaming of things at once dark and bright, amorphous and fluid, a strange and almost hypnotic dream that had him chasing things he couldn't quite see.

  The images fled as something cold and wet touched his arm. Disturbed, he pulled his arm away, barely aware of what he was doing, and tried to sink back into the dream.

  Moments later, he got a firm jab in the ribs.

  Shocked out of sleep, he bolted upright and tried to remember where he was. It was dark. The windows were in the wrong places. He had been lying on a…couch.

  Markie's place. But what the hell had poked him?

  The poke came again, this time on his knee. Cold and wet. Kato.

  Something like relief shuddered through him as he made out the dog's dark shape, a shadow among shadows.

  "You need a walk, boy?" he asked groggily. Damn, and the couch had been so comfortable.

  The shadow backed up a little, and some of the light from the street lamps outside glinted off golden eyes.

  "Okay." He rubbed his eyes and rolled his head, trying to loosen his neck.

  Hadn't Kato been sleeping with Markie? He'd thought she'd closed her door.

  But it was too early in the morning to be solving puzzles, so he pushed himself to his feet and went to get the leash.

  But Kato didn't follow. Instead, the quiet click of his claws and the jingle of his collar led toward the kitchen. Maybe Markie let him out back at night.

  Willing to do it whichever way, Dec followed.

  As he reached the kitchen and breakfast area, he saw Kato clearly silhouetted against the glass doors. The wolf was on his haunches, staring out into the night, clearly on alert.

  All of a sudden, the sleepy fog cleared from Dec's brain. He went to stand beside Kato. "What is it, boy?"

  The quietest of whimpers escaped the wolf, short and to the point. Dec looked in the direction Kato was staring, trying to figure out what had him disturbed.

  At first he could see nothing unusual. The backs of houses, shadowed strangely by the limited light from the street lamps. Everything looked peaceful.

  But Kato whimpered again, then gave a low growl that sounded like the ominous rumble of distant thunder.

  The hair on Dec's neck stood on end, and he squinted into the poorly lit area behind the house, trying to see something.

  Kato stirred, just a shifting of posture, but it bespoke uneasiness. Dec didn't know dogs as well as Markie did, and he wondered if he was making too much of this behavior.

  A soft, almost caressing chill wandered across his shoulders. At that instant, Kato rose to all fours and lowered his head, his attention still fixed outside. The chill came again, stronger.

  Dec shivered at the cold trickle of sweat in the small of his back. The caressing chill came and went, came and went, elusive but unmistakable. He was being played with, teased…in the way a cat would tease a mouse. As soon as the thought came he told himself not to go over the edge. There was nothing there.

  The wolf growled again, the rumble seeming to be emitted from his entire body.

  That was when Dec saw it. It came floating over the houses, slowly, just above the rooftops. A dark, vaporous cloud, not a fog, but something darker. As it passed before streetlights, they dimmed as if partially obscured.

  Then it was gone.

  He would not sleep this night. Finding Markie's bedroom door open a crack, he shooed Kato in there.

  "Watch her, Kato. Keep her safe." He was certain that the command was unnecessary.

  Then he pulled a chair from the kitchen and parked himself right outside Markie's door. The chair was uncomfortable, not something he could fall asleep in.

  Folding his arms, he stared into the darkness of the house and faced things he'd cast out of his life years ago. Things he was staunchly opposed to.

  Things his Irish blood told him were real.

  It struck him that he'd become as devout an atheist as he had once been a Catholic. Because both, for better or worse, were beliefs. He'd gotten angry at God and decided that God couldn't exist, because a loving God wouldn't allow such horrors as he had seen all too often.

  Which was not exactly a brilliant deduction, Watson, he told himself now. It was a reaction, not a considered position. Somehow he had decided it would be easier to bear the difficulties of life in a vacuum.

  Well, it hadn't been. And sitting there in the darkness, he at last admitted that the evil he had seen had been done by men, not by God.

  The mere fact that God had not intervened to create a perfect world where everyone lived in harmony, health and abundance didn't mean God didn't exist. It meant only that God had given men free will, and that men abused their ability to choose.

  But if he were to admit to the existence of God, then he had to confront the next logical question. If there was an ultimate good, was there an ultimate evil? For most of his life,
he had believed that there was no need for Satan. After all, men seemed to do enough dirty work on their own.

  But the question he had never answered was why men did such horrible things. Try as he might, he could not refute the notion that there might be an evil presence as surely as there was a God.

  And why wouldn't there be? he asked himself. Why not a sort of yin and yang struggling for dominance of the world, just as so many in the past had believed? If a God, why not an antigod?

  He sighed and shifted on his chair, wishing he weren't pondering these questions right now, alone, in the dark, with his shirt still clinging to the damp detritus of fear. This was a question he should ponder by day, with calm and dispassionate reason. Not when he was feeling things go bump in the night.

  And yet, he had heard Alice Wheatley speak with utter conviction about having seen the ghost of Annie Black. Then, hours later, he had watched her death throes, a marionette being shaken by a brutal hand. He had felt the darkness at the fort. And tonight he had felt it again. More, he had seen it.

  Skepticism was a healthy trait and part of his training as a doctor. But so was confronting the cold facts before one's eyes: something was at work on this island. And if that meant believing in God and antigod, well, he had no reasonable alternative.

  He listened to the darkness for a while but could detect nothing unusual. Silly. He ought to know by now that if anything were happening, Kato would be alerting in whatever way the wolf deemed necessary.

  Sighing again, he rose from the chair and went to the kitchen, where he stood in the dark and used Markie's phone to call Father Pedro Gutierrez. Pedro was his good golfing buddy and would probably fall into ecstasy when Dec told him what he wanted…even if it was three in the morning.

  "Father Gutierrez," said a familiar sleepy voice.

  "Pedro? It's Dec."

  A rustle and a yawn. "The course doesn't open until seven."

  Under other circumstances, Dec might have laughed, but there was nothing to laugh about tonight. "Pedro, I need to make my confession."

  A long silence this time. A very long one. When Pedro spoke again, his voice was gentle. "I can't do that over the phone, Dec."

  "I can't come over there. I'm…watching over a friend."

  "Then I'll come to you. Where are you?"

  Dec gave him the address.

  "Give me twenty minutes. I need to wash the sleep out of my eyes. Do I need to shave?"

  "Come in your pajamas if you want. Just come. Please."

  "On my way."

  When he disconnected, Dec realized his hand was shaking. He'd just taken a frighteningly huge step. The words of Nietzsche came to mind: When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.

  * * *

  Father Pedro arrived as quickly as promised. He wore shorts and a faded, lemon-yellow T-shirt that read Golf: The perfect combination of exercise and swearing. A wiry man of moderate height, his blond hair had been bleached almost white by years of tropical sun, and his skin had aged prematurely, making him look a good ten years older than his forty-five. He had a lively manner about him—when he was fully awake—and a smile that could light up a stadium.

  Dec put a finger to his lips as he let Pedro into the house and led the way to the kitchen. He was grateful that Kato apparently chose to ignore the intrusion. No sounds emerged from the direction of Markie's room.

  The kitchen was still dark; he hadn't turned on any lights. Pedro didn't say a word about it, simply felt his way to a stool at the island.

  "What's going on, Dec?"

  Dec slid onto the stool beside him and sought words. Thinking these things was difficult enough; voicing them was even harder. Finally he settled on, "Do you believe in Satan?"

  "Depends on what you mean by that. If you mean an Enemy in opposition to God, who tries to weaken us and tempt us away, then yes. If you mean a guy in a devil suit with a pitchfork, then no."

  "But what exactly is the Enemy?"

  "You know, God is so great that we can't even begin to imagine Him. We use words to describe Him that are true, but our consciousness can't begin to grasp the whole truth behind them. He is a being, a force, utterly beyond our comprehension. As we have been told, His ways are not our ways."

  Dec nodded. He'd been brought up with this.

  Pedro continued. "Consider, then, that some Enemy opposes him. Some people say human evil is enough to explain bad things. Maybe it is. But that doesn't explain what draws us to do these bad things. And at times, we're all drawn to do bad things. And some of these urges are pretty hard to explain. It's my feeling that the Enemy exists, but that he's so far beyond our comprehension, we can't truly discern His ways, either. Only that he is in opposition to the light."

  "But what about…evil spirits?" Dec had to squeeze the words out. He couldn't believe he was thinking these things, couldn't believe he was actually saying them.

  "What kind?" Pedro asked. Then, as Dec hesitated again, he said, "Look, let's not talk about this philosophically. You know the philosophy, probably as well as I do. Why don't you just tell me what's happening that has you asking these questions?"

  So Dec told him. Just the facts, ma'am, like Joe Friday in Dragnet. He chose to leave his feelings and reactions completely out of it. As clinically as he could, he told Pedro about Alice Wheatley, about the fort, about the dogs' behavior, Kato's in particular, and about what he had seen that night.

  Pedro's expression was virtually invisible in the dark, for which Dec was grateful. He waited uneasily for the priest to digest what he'd just heard and to assemble some thoughts about it. Pedro was rarely one to shoot from the cuff.

  "That," said Pedro finally, "gives me pause, too."

  "How so?"

  "I'll let you in a secret. I didn't believe in the devil until my bishop asked me to assist in an exorcism."

  "No kidding." Dec hadn't been aware such things still happened.

  "No kidding. Every diocese has a priest who is trained in the rite of exorcism. But he can't do it alone. We never leave a priest alone to confront a demon, so one or two other priests are designated as assistants. I was designated, given a bit of training, and went merrily on my way, figuring I'd never be called on."

  "But you were."

  Even in the darkness, he could see Pedro nod.

  "I was. An exorcism, you know, isn't really anything mysterious. It's basically a blessing, a prayer. Not much different from the anointing of the sick, in essence. Most of the time it takes an hour or two, and the possession is over. No big deal. Believe me, we don't see a lot of rotating heads and flying pea soup."

  Dec chuckled. "I would hope not."

  Pedro paused before continuing. "Anyway, one day I got the call. I trotted over there, expecting to spend an hour or two in intense prayer, maybe hear a few shameful secrets about myself, but sure I could withstand the humiliation. I wasn't prepared."

  He sighed. "All I can say, Dec, is that I have seen the devil. And he's more vile and terrifying than anything you want to imagine. But he's also puny and weak compared with God. If we're strong in our faith, he's helpless. He tries to rattle that faith, to make us doubt and turn away. If we stand firm, he moves on to easier prey.

  "Let me tell you, Dec, there's nothing like an encounter with the devil to make you believe in God."

  "So…you don't think I'm crazy?"

  "Heck, no. In fact, you have me seriously worried. I've dealt with demons, yes, but I've never dealt with a persistent evil spirit of a dead person."

  There. It was out. Pedro had finally said the very thing Dec had been trying to avoid. "I don't want to believe that."

  "I don't blame you. And if you think I've got any ideas for how to deal with a disembodied spirit, I'm going to have to disappoint you."

  Dec sighed and drummed his fingers on the counter. "I think I was hoping you'd tell me such things couldn't exist."

  Pedro gripped his shoulder. "You're a good observer. And you're too honest a man to lie to yours
elf. You know what you saw, and you know it wasn't natural. You know what evil feels like, and you felt it. So, do you still want to make your confession?"

  Somehow, Dec did. After all these years, he felt the need to reconcile with God, to say he was sorry for being so stubborn. It was time to admit that he'd acted like a child, turning his back on God because God wasn't playing by Dec's rules.

  Pedro handled it like a conversation, talking with him quietly, and in the end absolving him and giving him his penance. It was a mild penance for one who'd denied God for so many years, but Dec figured Pedro was just glad to have him back in the flock.

  "Read Matthew, chapters five through seven, every day for the next month," Pedro told him.

  "I don't think I have a Bible."

  "You know where to get one. If you can't find it, let me know. I've got plenty of extras."

  Feeling oddly lighthearted, Dec almost laughed.

  That was when the kitchen lights snapped on, nearly blinding them both for an instant.

  In the doorway, wrapped in a red silk robe, stood Markie, with Kato beside her. "I thought I heard voices," she said sleepily. "What are you two up to?"

  20

  It was gone. Whatever had driven Gary was gone as surely as if someone had flipped a switch. His face softened into its customary lines. For an instant, he looked confused.

  Watching the change, Wendy grew uneasy. This time, when she pulled her robe on, he didn't say anything. In fact, he looked at the steak he was cooking and asked, "Did you want this?"

  A shiver passed through Wendy. She dropped abruptly to one of the kitchen chairs. "You started cooking it, Gary."

  "I did?"

  "I thought you wanted it."

  "Odd," he said, looking at the rapidly charring T-bone. "Well, I don't want to waste it."

  Gary was always very conscious about not being wasteful. As soon as the steak was ready, he divided it onto two plates and put one in front of Wendy. Her stomach turned over at the sight.

  "Do you want anything with it?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "I don't think I can eat."

  She waited for him to become demanding, the way he had only a few minutes ago, but he let it pass.