J.A. Konrath / Jack Kilborn Trilogy - Three Scary Thriller Novels (Origin, The List, Haunted House)

by J. A. Konrath

“Yes or no, Mr. Dennison?”

  “I don’t know. I’d need materials.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, some language programs. A chalk board. Children’s books.”

  “How about one of those phonics programs for kids?” Sun suggested. “We could wheel in a big screen TV and a DVD.”

  “That might work,” Andy nodded.

  “So when do you think he could know enough to answer questions in English?” Race asked.

  “Well, I couldn’t possibly predict when… I mean, there’s no precedent for this.”

  “How long did it take you to learn Japanese?”

  “I got a good grasp of the language in about a week, but it took a while before I was fluent.”

  “You have until tomorrow. Write down all of the supplies you’ll need, I’ll have them air dropped here within the hour.”

  “Tomorrow? That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t even know how to begin.”

  “With the ABCs,” Race said, heading for the door. “I’ll be in the Octopus. Let me know what you need.”

  This was an interesting turn of events, Race thought. Interesting indeed.

  Why was she tied to this bed? Where was her husband? She called to him.

  “Regis! Regis, help me!”

  Then her legs began to tremble violently. She tried but couldn’t control the shaking, which became more and more spastic. Her arms followed suit, flapping up and down on the short tethers as if she were being electrocuted.

  Without the tethers she might have whacked herself in the face. Perhaps that’s what they were for.

  The tremors subsided, and a memory flickered in her mind, so quickly that it might have been simply a fleeting thought and not a memory at all. A memory of her mother, tethered to a bed like she was, cursing uncontrollably.

  “Mother was sick,” she said aloud, alone in her hospital bed.

  This was a hospital, wasn’t it? The walls were white. The bed had rails. There was medical equipment on a cart next to her. But when she listened, there were no other noises. Weren’t hospitals noisy places, full of comings and goings and doctors and nurses and intercoms? If this wasn’t a hospital, where was she?

  “Regis!” she called out. “Regis, where am I! Help me, Regis!”

  The door opened, and an old man walked in. He looked so familiar, but she couldn’t place him. He was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. Not a doctor. A visitor?

  “I’m here, Helen. It’s me.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “It’s Regis, Helen. Your husband.”

  “Bullshit,” she spat. “My husband is a young man. You’re an old fart!”

  Rather than seem shocked, or even bothered by her outburst, the man simply picked up a hand mirror from one of the medical carts. He held it in front of her.

  My God! She was old! How did she get so old?

  “We’re both old, Helen. You don’t remember because you have Huntington’s Disease. You’ve had it for many years now.”

  “Oh my Lord.”

  The spike of realization pierced her heart. She remembered now—this awful disease that she inherited from her mother. It debilitated the nervous system, causing memory and motor function loss. The tethers were there to hold her arms down when the chorea hit—frenzied palsies that she couldn’t control.

  “Oh I remember, Regis, oh dear Lord I remember.”

  He held her close, running his hands over the back of her head.

  “It will be okay soon, Helen. I promise. Things are happening. We’ll leave here soon, get you better medical treatment. There’s hope. They’re making new advancements in gene therapy every day.”

  His words didn’t cheer her. While they were admittedly hopeful, her husband’s delivery was wrong. He was saying it like it was something he’d memorized and repeated a hundred times before.

  And then it occurred to her… what if he had said it a hundred times before?

  The chorea hit again, and he held her quivering body until it passed.

  “I… love you… Regis.”

  “I love you too, Helen. Do you want to sleep for a while?”

  She nodded. “And I’m thirsty.”

  He poured some water from a pitcher on a nearby table and held the glass while she drank. He also checked her diaper, which he found to be clean. She began to cry at the indignity of it.

  “Oh, Regis…”

  “Shh. I’ve got something that will help.” Regis went to the medicine cabinet hanging on the far wall and removed a syringe and a bottle. He extracted some liquid like a pro.

  “Regis, dear, where did you learn to do that?”

  He put on a weak smile. “Just a little something to help you sleep and help with the seizures.”

  “Are you sure you can do this?”

  He nodded, and placed a hand on her face to stroke her cheek.

  The shot didn’t hurt at all. As she began to get drowsy, she concentrated on her husband’s words.

  “He has powers, Helen. Amazing powers. It’ll all be okay soon. I promise.”

  “Who has powers, Regis?” she asked.

  “Bub does, Helen. Everything will be okay soon.”

  She tried to focus on him and smiled. “I know it will, dear. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Helen. Sweet dreams.”

  She drifted off to sleep, thinking about her husband, wondering how he got so old.

  Faith would be a thing of the past.

  Electrified by the idea, Father Michael Thrist stared at Bub. The beast crouched in front of the Plexiglas while Andy, Sun, and Dr. Belgium pointed out the ABCs on a chalkboard. Could this demon be the thing Thrist had been searching for all these years?

  Michael entered the priesthood thirty years ago. A double threat—severe acne and a facial tic than caused him to blink and twitch his upper lip at inopportune moments—made college hell, even at a prestigious school like Notre Dame.

  Sophomore year he switched his major from biology to theology, partly because he believed he’d never get a date in his life, but mostly because he found science woefully inadequate to explain the many mysteries of the universe.

  After completing his pre-theologate, he served as a deacon for two years at a small church in Gary, Indiana. The area was poor, with one of the highest murder rates in the US. When he received the sixth sacrament and entered the priesthood, he requested a transfer from the archdiocese.

  Then came his ascension, as he liked to call it. Which lead him to his current position at Samhain, and to watching a linguist and a vet try teach a demon ABC’s.

  Shotzen leaned over and whispered to Thrist, “Soon they’ll be roasting marshmallows and singing campfire songs.”

  Thrist ignored the comment. Couldn’t Shotzen see what was before them? How could he remain skeptical? If anyone should be skeptical, it was Thrist. He’d had the training.

  After Indiana, Michael had been assigned to a low income Hispanic neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. Though fluent in Spanish—a natural extension of the Latin he learned in school—his new flock never accepted an Anglo as one of their own, especially one whose was always winking and twitching the left side of his face.

  He’d been there for a year when the altar boy came to his room, jabbering about a miracle. A local woman had a painting of the Virgin Mary that was crying tears of blood. Thrist had gone to see for himself.

  “You’re not buying this, are you?” Shotzen whispered, interrupting his reverie.

  “What do you mean?” Thrist replied. “And what’s with the whispering?”

  “Shh! Come here, in private.”

  The Rabbi ushered the priest out of his chair and over to the corner of the room, between the data banks of the Cray computer.

  “Don’t you see what I see?” Shotzen urged, his cherubic eyes looking very serious.

  “What do you see, Rabbi?”

  “Bub, the demon. I think he already knows English. This is all deception.”

  “Ridi
culous.”

  “If it were an angel in there, instead of a devil, wouldn’t you think it already knew English? If this thing is from the pits of hell, surely they know English in hell? If hell exists, the English have been going there for a thousand years.”

  “But if he did know English already, why pretend otherwise?”

  “Baalzebub is the master of lies, Father. It is his nature to deceive. You said so yourself. Perhaps he’s buying some time.”

  “Buying time until what?”

  The chubby holy man shrugged.

  Thrist stopped short of rolling his eyes. “Look, Rabbi, the creature has only been awake for a week. He was discovered in Panama, which, the last time I checked, is not an English-speaking country. He’d been buried since the time of the Mayans. It’s hardly likely he knows English.”

  Shotzen folded his arms. “I’m convinced he’s deceiving us.”

  “Do you at least agree he’s a demon?”

  “I’m undecided. You’re the debunking expert, yet you seem to be eating this up.”

  “If Bub’s a fake, I can’t spot it.” Thrist said. “And I’m good at spotting deception.”

  The bleeding painting had been unremarkable in its execution, a typical pieta scene. But streaking down the Virgin’s face were trails of blood, and a puddle the size of a throw rug was pooling on the floor.

  Thrist’s first reaction to it was disbelief, but upon examination he couldn’t find any holes or tubes behind the canvas, and the blood smelled, felt, and even tasted real. Could this truly be a miracle?

  The gathering crowd seemed to think so. The old mestizo woman who owned the painting was charging people five dollars a head to come in and genuflect after dipping their fingers in the puddle of blood.

  This incensed the priest. His parishioners were worshiping a false idol, rather than God. But he couldn’t figure out the trick.

  His epiphany would come the following day at lunch, when he was making himself a grilled cheese sandwich in the toaster oven. He’d left it in too long and the toast burned, all of the cheese melting and leaking out from between the bread.

  That, of course, was the answer.

  He had returned to the apartment, his Roman collar allowing him to bypass a line that stretched around the block, and again asked to examine the painting. The several burly men standing over the growing pile of money almost refused, but the old woman relented. In one quick move Thrist seized the painting and dashed it to the floor.

  There were several cries of horror. The cries turned to outrage when he held up the broken frame and showed the crowd the hollow middle where the blood had been stored. Then he tore the false canvas off the back of the painting, exposing the thin plastic tube that fed the blood from the reservoir in the frame to the Virgin’s eyes. They had sandwiched the tube between two canvases, attempting to make them appear as one. Thrist guessed that there was a hole somewhere in the frame that they could use to refill it with chicken blood, or whatever blood they’d been using.

  “Still searching for the fakery?” Shotzen mused. “It’s there. You just aren’t looking close enough.”

  “I’ve been looking for it for over thirty years,” Thrist replied.

  Shotzen sighed. “Michael, you’ve said it yourself. Adonai works in subtle ways. You’ve spoken to me about your acne and your facial tic, and how they went away during your early years as a priest. That’s how ha-shem works. He isn’t a show off like this.”

  Shortly after he’d proven the painting a fake, Thrist’s childhood afflictions had gone away. But whether that had been a sign from God or simply a physical manifestation of his own growing self-confidence, Thrist had never decided.

  “Rabbi, what other explanation is there? We’ve been discussing this since your arrival more than twenty years ago. We’ve done the research. We’ve posed the theories. Fallen angel, genetic experiment, biological weapon, man in a rubber suit—neither of us can find any evidence of fraud.”

  “So just because we can’t see it, it isn’t there? During your tour as Vatican Examiner, did you ever authenticate a miracle?”

  Thrist frowned. “No.”

  It had been a wonderful time for Thrist, serving the Lord with a renewed vigor. His Eminence the Cardinal removed him from the Chicago parish and Thrist traveled throughout the Americas, investigating miraculous phenomena. Sometimes the occurrence was amusing, such as the case in Texas where Christ’s face had appeared simultaneously on several dozen cow patties—they turned out to be hoof marks. Sometimes it was appalling, such as the baby who was supposedly exhibiting signs of the stigmata, when actually it was his disturbed mother inflicting the wounds with a razor blade.

  But for all his travels, he never authenticated a miracle.

  “Look at the mounting evidence,” Thrist insisted. “Bub has mentioned both heaven and Jesus Christ. He can resurrect sheep. He speaks in ancient tongues…”

  “What language is he speaking now?”

  “I’m not sure. Sounds like Egyptian.”

  “I tell you, the beast is a liar. He can speak all languages, I’m convinced. Watch this.”

  Shotzen marched over the Plexiglas and gave it a tap, drawing Bub’s attention.

  “Anachnu holchim leshamen otcha ve’lehchol otcha,” he said to Bub.

  Bub cocked his head to the side, doing a damn good imitation of confusion.

  “What did he say?” Sun asked.

  “He told Bub we’re going to fatten him up and eat him,” Andy turned to Shotzen. “Isn’t the food here good enough for you, Rabbi?”

  “Fah!” Shotzen said, pointing at the demon. “You understand me. I know you do. Admit it!”

  Bub looked hard at Shotzen, and the holy man took a step back, dropping his arm.

  “He understands me.” Shotzen whispered. “Every word.”

  “Perhaps Yiddish?” Thrist offered a tight smile. Mirth was an emotion he rarely showed, but the whole idea of a demon speaking Hebrew amused him. Everyone knew demons spoke Latin.

  Epiphany.

  “Latin,” Thrist said aloud.

  He rushed the glass, pressing his palms against it.

  “Potesne dicere Latinam?” he asked Bub.

  Can you speak Latin?

  The demon turned his attention to the priest. “Ita, Latinam dico.”

  Yes, I speak Latin.

  “Ubi Latinam didicisti?” Thrist asked.

  Where did you learn Latin?

  “Me abimperatore in loco appellato Roma ea docta est.”

  It was taught to me by an emperor in a place called Rome.

  “Quis rex erat? Quando regnabat?”

  Who was this king? When did he rule?

  “Aliquem hac aetate eum noscere dubito. Misere cecidit. Membra senatus sui eum insidiis interfecerunt.”

  I doubt anyone remembers him in this era. He died poorly. Members of his senate assassinated him.

  “Caesar!” Thrist cried, his voice cracking in an octave that was normally too high for him. “Julius Caesar!”

  “Illud erat nomen,” Bub said. His voice was oddly sensual, almost a verbal caress. “Quis nunc imperator tuus est?”

  That was his name. Who is your emperor in this age?”

  “What just happened?” Sun asked.

  “Apparently Julius Caesar taught Bub Latin,” Andy replied.

  Thrist’s heart was threatening to burst from his rib cage. He was talking with a being who lived in the era of Christ. In the same part of the world. This was even more incredible than he’d imagined.

  A demon by itself was ample evidence for the existence of God. But could this creature also prove without doubt that Jesus was God’s son on earth?

  This was the dawn of a new era. Religious differences, agnosticism, atheism, war, inhumanity; they’d all be things of the past. The world would embrace Bub’s message and a collective effort would be made to worship the one true God. The Christian God.

  Thrist’s God.

  “Habesne cognitionem
viri religiosi ex Galileo, qui in Bethlehem natus est? Iudaes qui multos disipulos habebat?”

  Did you know of a religious man from Galleli, born in Bethlehem? A Jew with a large following?

  “Jeeeesus Christ,” Bub said the name in English. “I haaaaave seeeeen Jeeeeesus.”

  The breath caught in Thrist’s throat and his lower jaw began to tremble. All the Bible study, all the research, all the prayers, none of it had brought Thrist as close to God as he was feeling right now.

  “Narro de eo, sis.”

  Please, tell me of him.

  “Father,” Rabbi Shotzen cut in. “We have time for this later.”

  “Narro de eo,” Thrist implored.

  “Father,” Shotzen sighed, “please let them get on with their work. This can wait.”

  “Bullshit!” the priest spat at Shotzen. The rabbi recoiled in surprise. “You don’t want to hear of it because you don’t want to hear the truth! For two thousand years you’ve been waiting for a Messiah that already came! You missed Him! Now’s your chance to atone for your mistake!”

  Thrist turned to Bub and begged, “Tell me of Jesus! Tell me what you know!”

  The demon stretched his mouth wide in a grin.

  “Serius, Pater. Tempus sine arbitrus mox habebimus.”

  Later, Father. We’ll have time alone soon.

  Bub was using the same soothing voice that he’d used with the sheep.

  “Sciendus sum! Eratne Deus? Estne natus ex virgine? Cognitionem eius habebas… erasne qui in desertis eum temptabas? Heu, sciendus sum!”

  I must know! Was he God? Was he born of a virgin? You knew him… were you the one that tempted him in the desert? I must know dammit!

  “Soooooon,” soothed the demon. He gave his attention back to Andy and Sun.

  Thrist banged on the glass, but Bub paid him no mind.

  Thrist stepped back and looked at the others. Andy looked embarassed. Sun was frowning. He turned to Rabbi Shotzen, and was stunned to see the sadness on his friend’s chubby face.

  “I… I’m…”

  Shotzen gave him his back.

  “For a man of faith you’re showing surprisingly little,” the Rabbi said.

  Thrist opened his mouth, closed it again. His face became very hot. He didn’t trust his voice. He reached for the crucifix hanging from his neck.