Robert didn’t answer, partly because the pain in his chest had grown to immense proportions, and partly because he had no fucking clue what was going on.
“Who are you?” Robert asked. In his periphery, he picked up Sean and Aiden flanking him, guns raised. Even Sean, who must have known that his pistol would do no good against the dead, aimed the barrel directly at the guard’s head.
“My…my name’s Quinn,” the man said.
“You were a guard here?” Sean asked over Robert’s shoulder.
The man nodded.
“Worked here for seventeen years. Worked here until…until…a few days ago?”
The end of the man’s sentence made it sound more like a question than a statement.
“And what happened a few days ago?” Sean pressed. Robert, his chest still tight to the point of making it difficult to breath, wondered where this line of question was going…and what the point was.
Whatever his intention, Robert hoped that Sean got to it quickly, because he had a feeling that as soon as the pain in his chest became too great and he lowered his hand, Quinn would be on the move again. And then there was no telling what would happen.
“I—I—I don’t know,” he stammered.
“Why did you come at us? Why were you laughing?”
“I don’t—”
Something in the man’s face suddenly changed, as if he suddenly remembered.
“The man in black,” he whispered, and Robert felt his chest tighten again.
Leland Black.
“He told me to…told me that—”
“That’s enough,” Sean instructed.
“He told me that if I didn’t, that if I let you guys interfere, then he would bring the girl.”
“Enough!”
“Wait, what girl?” Robert interjected.
“Robert, we have to go.”
Quinn shook his head violently from side to side.
“He said that if I brought the priest—”
“The priest?” This time it was Shelly who interrupted.
Robert’s chest suddenly crunched, and he let out a grunt. He couldn’t hold this man for much longer.
“Leland said he needed the priest to open the gate. The rift—I don’t really know—”
Robert shook his head and asked his question through gritted teeth.
“What girl?”
“Robert—”
“What fucking girl?” he demanded with the last of his strength.
An odd silence fell over them.
Eventually, the man answered, and Robert, oddly confident that he would no longer attack them, lowered his hand.
Whatever hold Leland had had on this man, Robert had broken in.
“Amy. He said a girl named Amy would come, and that she would bring the demons with her.”
Robert bent over at the waist, and then he stood up straight, sucking in a giant breath of air. His throat and lungs burned as if he was breathing in caustic fumes.
“Amy,” he gasped. He felt Shelly grab hold of his shoulders, but he shrugged her off.
Quinn, now able to move, took a step backward.
“Sean,” he gasped, “what the hell is he talking about?”
“We need to go, Robert—we need to stop Father Callahan.”
Sean tried to push past him, but Robert held out his arm. The man, still fearful of his touch, stopped just short of making contact.
“Tell me what he’s talking about. How does he know about Amy?”
Sean sighed and lowered his gun.
“There is more to the prophecy in the book, in Inter vivos et mortuos.”
Robert’s eyes narrowed and he took another breath, the pressure in his chest easing a little more.
“Sean—you better tell me what the fuck this man is talking about,” Robert threatened.
Sean’s eyes bored into him. Robert stood his ground, and the man eventually looked away.
“The prophecy isn’t just about Leland, Robert. It also speaks of a young girl, born of Guardians of great power, who holds the rift in the Marrow open. She is the one that brings the evil back to earth.”
Robert could do nothing but gape at Sean. His face and upper body were completely covered in blood and gore from the inmate that had been blown away, but he barely noticed.
“What?”
Sean said nothing. For a second time, Shelly tried to grab Robert, but again he shook her off.
“I told you all I know.”
Robert gritted his teeth, and felt his anger start to bubble over.
“You motherfucker! You never told me any of this! Amy! Amy?”
Sean’s eyes flicked up.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything,” the man yelled back.
Robert wasn’t one for violence, but he was on the precipice of striking the man.
“You weren’t supposed to? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
He moved right into Sean’s face.
“What the fuck—?”
Shelly grabbed his arm, and this time he thrust her away angrily. She stumbled backward and bumped hard against the back wall.
Robert ignored her—he was too far gone now.
“It was in the book,” Sean said simply.
“This fucking book! Give me the fucking book!”
“I don’t have it.”
Aiden, who had been standing silently the whole time, his gun trained on the door to the mess hall, spat a wad of dip to the floor.
“Someone’s moving,” he said.
Nobody took notice.
“Who has this goddamn book, then?”
“Father Callahan.”
Robert’s eyes narrowed.
“The fucking priest? The priest who’s here somewhere?”
Sean nodded.
“Then we’ll just have to go get it.”
Sean opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again.
“What? Say it, Sean. Just fucking say it.”
“Robert, your daughter—”
Robert saw red and lashed out with his fist. His knuckles connected with the side of Sean’s face with a resounding crack. Pain shot up his hand and he immediately shook his fist at his side.
Sean stumbled backward, then righted himself.
He didn’t rub his jaw.
“Don’t you ever speak of her again, do you hear me? Sean, do you—?”
But another voice, a familiar male voice, suddenly spoke from behind him, and he froze.
“Robert? You’re glowing, Robert. You’re glowing.”
Robert spun on his heels and then almost fell to the ground.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
There was a kid standing behind Shelly, whose eyes, nearly hidden behind circular spectacles, were moist, and he was holding a camera in his hands.
Beside the kid was Robert’s best friend in the world.
And Cal looked worse than he had ever seen him.
Chapter 34
The hallway was dark and damp and reeked of brine. Father Callahan’s pace slowed as he neared the final door to the room, realizing that he was on the verge of meeting the man—just a boy then—that he had abandoned more than two decades prior.
And he was going to kill him, because he had to.
He was nervous, not for his own life, but of failing.
Father Callahan put a hand on the door to the cell and took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes. Even though he had since moved on from his God, he fell into old habits and started to pray, even though there were no gods of the Marrow to hear him.
Our Father, who art—
“Come in, Callahan, the door is unlocked.”
The priest’s cataractous eyes snapped open.
It was time. And he was ready.
Father Callahan pushed the hard wooden door, and it slowly started to open. Then he stepped inside.
The room was as he had seen on the monitor with Ben what seemed like a decade ago now: small, square, nondescr
ipt. Although in the video there had been a bed and toilet in the room, those were gone now, likely removed by the inmates that were guarding Cell Block E.
Even the man’s clothes, previously balled in the corner of the room, were gone.
Carson Ford was sitting with his back to Father Callahan, his legs crossed in front of him, his hands resting gently on his thighs. The man was unassuming in stature, his thin body accentuated by the vertebrae that jutted from his skin. He was covered in bruises, which Callahan assumed were from the guards—minor vengeance after what had happened to their friend and colleague.
There was also a strange hum in the air, and a tightness in his chest that he had felt in the hallway began to intensify.
“Carson,” he said softly, but his words incited no reaction from the man. Father Callahan resisted the urge to reach through his robe and grab the knife therein.
It would be easy to pull it out, then trace a line across the man’s throat as he sat with his back to him.
Too easy.
Which meant that Carson had something up his sleeve. A card to play.
A wild card.
The devil will confuse, confound with his tricks.
“Carson,” he said again, hoping that this time the man would turn.
He did not.
The man’s back expanded as he took a particularly deep breath, then his whole body shook as if he were an athlete trying to get loose before an event.
“Father Callahan, I’ve been waiting for you.”
This time, Father Callahan couldn’t resist the urge to slip his hand inside his robe and grab the handle of the knife.
“But before we get started, I have a few questions for you. Would that be okay?”
Carson’s politeness threw Father Callahan off guard. The man before him didn’t seem like a psychopathic murderer.
The devil’s tricks.
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“May I ask you a few questions?”
Father Callahan’s grip tightened and he took a few steps forward. He was only four feet from the man’s back now, so close that he could smell the reek of the man’s sweat.
“Yes,” he replied softly.
“Thank you, Father.”
Carson cleared his throat.
“Do you remember that day? That day in the summer when we first met?”
Despite trying to ignore the man’s words, to remain focused, an image of Sean Sommers at his church door all those years ago flashed in his mind nonetheless.
“Yes, yes, I remember,” he admitted.
“Do you think that if you had taken me instead of Robert, things would be different?”
Another image, this time of the two boys, one in each of Sean’s hands. Twin boys.
Father Callahan didn’t answer the question, because he didn’t know.
How could he?
Carson laughed.
“What about both of us, then? What if you had taken both of us, found a nice home for me as well as my brother? Did you ever think of that?”
Callahan swallowed hard. Ever since he had first heard of Carson Ford, and realized who he really was, these very thoughts had coursed through his head. And the guilt had eaten him up for years.
It still ate at his quiddity to this day.
He could have taken both—if only he had known then who they were. If he had just known more, if Sean had just told him more, had helped him translate the book, he would have taken both.
Instead, he had only taken Robert. And he had failed even this boy, shipping him off with foster parents so that Leland couldn’t find him again.
And then he had found Leland; he and the other Guardians.
Father Callahan refused to think of what happened next.
“Oh, please, Father, don’t feel compelled to answer. Consider these,” he laughed again, “simple musings of a madman. After all, most everyone else has. Even your friend Ben, he thinks I’m mad. Refuses to listen.”
Father Callahan was in the process of taking another step forward, but hesitated at the mention of his friend’s name.
“But you, Father. You are different. You know things, you’ve seen them. You’ve felt them. You probably feel them now…a tightness in your chest, perhaps? Or slowing of time?”
Callahan tried not to pay attention to what the man was saying, but he found himself unable to resist.
Carson laughed again.
“That’s okay, Father. Like I said, you don’t have to answer. But I want to tell you a story…would that be okay?”
“Yes,” Callahan croaked. His throat suddenly felt incredibly dry, no matter how many times he swallowed.
From behind, he could see Carson nod ever so slightly.
“You know, at first, I killed for vengeance, revenge. That’s it—there wasn’t any deeper meaning to it. I stabbed my stepfather in the chest after he had put a cigar out on my arm. Then I slit my stepmother’s throat.”
Carson shrugged.
“That’s when I learned I liked it. I suppose deep down it was a control thing—not being able to control anything in my life, I exerted my control over others instead, in the most fundamental of ways. By taking their lives. Me ‘n’ Buddy used to do that—shit, we did that a lot. But it wasn’t until my eighth or ninth kill that I actually watched them die. Really watched them. And that was when I saw something in their faces, something that I knew shouldn’t have been there. A release of sorts.”
Callahan inched forward.
“And this got me to thinking…thinking about realization, about self-awareness. I spent considerable time contemplating the fact that humans know we are alive, that we know we are conscious, self-aware. This really is a fucked-up thing, if you put some thought into it. Don’t you agree, Father?”
Callahan paused, hoping that the question was rhetorical.
It wasn’t.
“Father? It is fucked up, wouldn’t you agree?”
“It is…unique.”
Carson laughed.
“Certainly one way of putting it. We are the only beings that are self-aware, that much is certain. But it’s also fucked. I mean, when I was growing up, trying to live off dumpster scraps, trying to stay away from the junkie that prick Sean left me with and her abusive pimp, I knew that I was fucked. That I hurt. That I—” For the first time since Father Callahan had entered the room, Carson moved one of his hands. He brought his right index finger to his chest. “—I hurt. I knew I was getting the short end of the stick, you know? But the question I always had, even though I couldn’t articulate it back then, was why I knew this. And that’s when I started to learn about the Marrow. That was when my real father, when Leland, started speaking to me.”
At the mention of the Goat’s name, Father Callahan took a deep breath.
“Exactly. Scary bastard, isn’t he? But he also told me about you, Father. Which is why I knew that eventually you would come. When the barrier between the Marrow and this world started to weaken, I knew that you would come.”
Then Carson laughed, and Father Callahan knew that he could wait no longer. He slipped the knife out of from beneath his robes and strode forward as quickly as his ancient body would allow. In as fluid a movement as he could muster, he reached forward, placed his hand on Carson’s forehead, and pulled back, while at the same time pressing the tip of the blade against the man’s bare throat.
It was Carson’s lack of reaction that caused Father Callahan to hesitate. He should have just buried the blade deep in his neck and got it over with.
But Carson just smiled, as if he knew this was coming all along.
And perhaps he had known.
“Do it,” the man hissed. “Kill me, Father. I have no fear of death—I know which choice I will make on the shores of the Marrow. The question is, do you, Father? Father Callahan, are you ready to eradicate yourself? Or will you join us in the flames?”
Chapter 35
Ben triple checked the shotguns and pistol before le
aving the room. His system was flooded with adrenaline, in a way that was foreign to him. Sure, as warden of Seaforth Prison, he was always on edge, prepared for anything from the inmates, but this was different. Ben was typically on the defense, ready to react rather than act.
But today was different.
Today he was on the offensive.
“Step aside,” he instructed Peter. The man did as he was instructed, head bowed. Ben stepped forward and swiped his keycard on the door.
It worked, which came as a welcome surprise. Evidently when Smitts had fried the circuit board with the Taser and the emergency power had come back on, it had reset whatever fucked-up virus Peter had infected the system with.
He pulled the door wide, and then held it open with his foot.
“Move.”
Peter stepped in front of him, traipsing through the blood on the stairs where Smitts had been stabbed.
Fucking Smitts…fucking Quinn…fucking Callahan.
Ben fought the tears away again.
As a veteran of two wars, Ben Tristen was no stranger to seeing friends and comrades fall. But today was different. Back then he had been a fucking grunt, obeying orders as they all did, no matter how inane. But today, here at Seaforth, he was in charge. And those who died today did so on his watch—under his command.
“Fuck,” he murmured.
Blinking rapidly to clear his vision, he pushed the muzzle of the shotgun into Peter’s back again, forcing him forward.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, he half expected Carson to peek his head around as he had when Smitts had been stabbed, and his finger tensed on the trigger of the shotgun.
But there was no one there.
He half believed that he had made that up, just like he had made up that he had seen Quinn after he had died. But the other half of him…
Smitts said he saw him…Smitts, of all people.
And then there was what Peter and Father Callahan had said. All that bullshit about Carson and some fucked-up afterlife.
Ben shook his head and opened the door at the bottom of the stairwell. To be safe, he shoved Peter through first, crouching behind him, the shotgun armed and ready.
Nothing.
No more gunfire, which had drawn him from the control room in the first place.
Seaforth Prison (The Haunted Book 3) Page 13
