by Ninie Hammon
She seemed to realize it, too, because she went rigid and took a step back, away from him.
“Just understand this one thing. We don’t have the luxury any more of pretending it’s not real. You and Andi…could get dragged into it.”
Her eyes grew wide and she searched his face, looking for—doubt, maybe; a niggling disbelief she could hook her own to and they could sail along together down the River of Denial. Whatever she was looking for, she didn’t find.
“Emily, there are still two men out there somewhere—two possessed men. Eventually, one or the other of them is going to show up here in Cincinnati.”
“Why? What for? What do they want?”
“They want to kill Jack. And me. ”
Fear as real as a gust of wind passed between them.
* * * * * * *
Andi could hear their voices. Daddy had gotten home and he and Mommy were talking. She could only hear the tone of their voices, though, not the words. But they didn’t sound mad at each other. They weren’t yelling or anything. She’d asked Sara Henry about it, what it was like when her parents got a divorce and she said they fought all the time and it was loud and sometimes her mother threw things and her Daddy said really bad words.
Mommy and Daddy didn’t do that, so most of the time Andi could convince herself that Mommy and Daddy weren’t getting a divorce…that they weren’t downstairs right now talking about it.
She felt a thump on the bed and heard Ossy start to purr even before she reached out to gather him close and smooth his splotchy fur.
“I could go down and listen, see what they’re talking about,” she said into the cat’s fur, but she didn’t actually want to know. She was afraid of what she’d hear if they didn’t know she was listening.
When she was with them, Mommy and Daddy talked to each other just like they always had. Except it was different, all wrong—awful—and she had to pretend like she didn’t even notice.
She felt her eyes well with tears. All three of them spent every day pretending, about everything! And she hated it. She was pretending she didn’t know they had talked about getting a divorce. When they’d found her crying on the stairs the night Princess Buttercup came and she saw the shapes in her room, she had lied and said she was upset about a bad dream—because she couldn’t tell them what she’d heard. If she said it—divorce—out loud, the word would be out there and they’d have to look at it and talk about it and maybe then it would come true.
And they were pretending everything was just fine between them, and it wasn’t. Daddy never kissed Mommy anymore. He never even touched her, didn’t reach out and take her hand or put his arm around her. Mommy didn’t look in Daddy’s eyes when she talked to him, she didn’t laugh at something he said so hard she fell into his lap like she used to do. She didn’t laugh at all, in fact. Neither one of them did. They didn’t even smile.
God, do you do things like stop people from getting a divorce?
Andi whispered the words into the plain old darkness of her room that was different from the darkness Princess Buttercup had brought that looked like there was a light behind it.
Please don’t let them go live in different places like Sara’s parents. Please.
Andi had prayed her whole life, talked to God every night before she went to bed and other times, too, when she had something to tell him. But after that day at school when Uncle Jack…after that, God was…real. And sometimes…sometimes she almost wished she hadn’t come back when Uncle Jack had called her.
If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be lying here now—scared and sad. And feeling so alone. How she wished Princess Buttercup would come! Thinking of Princess Buttercup brought to mind the vision that had been bigger than this room, bigger than this whole house, eight images tumbling over and over before her.
Splatters of colors. A square with little feet beside a telephone pole. Two silver circles, a red triangle, a bell, a cross pointed at the top and a straight brown line.
“Why did you show those to me, God? Why—?”
She heard her mother’s footsteps on the stairs and quickly shooed Ossy out of the bed onto the floor. Then she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep when her mother tiptoed into her room, took off her robe and lay down on the daybed in front of the window.
Mommy and Daddy didn’t even sleep in the same bed anymore!
Andi started to cry. She couldn’t help it. She cried as softly as she could, her face buried in her pillow, and her mother didn’t hear her because she didn’t come to ask what was wrong. In fact, it sounded like…maybe Mommy was crying, too.
* * * * * * *
Scott Nicholson thought it was cool the first time he ever saw it, and he still did. Every time he looked at it out the window of the Easy Stop where he worked, he smiled. On the other side of Interstate 71 sat a big white water tower with red stripes on the top that looked like a gigantic peppermint. Huge black letters on the tower proclaimed “FLORENCE Y’ALL,” and that had seemed appropriate to Scott, a Michigan boy, even before he knew the legend behind it. After all, this was the Kentucky city that bordered the Ohio River, so the South met the North here, and the sign seemed justifiable southern pride.
Then he’d heard the story, one of those stories that “if it isn’t true, it should be.” Seems the sign, originally painted as an advertisement for the businesses surrounding it, had read: FLORENCE MALL. But apparently the taxpayers of the city of Florence didn’t appreciate the use of municipal property as a billboard. Feathers flew over who should pay the expense of having the enormous water tower repainted. Might even have been a lawsuit—nobody he talked to knew for sure what did happen. All they knew was that one morning folks driving along Interstate 71 toward Cincinnati were greeted with a cheerful FLORENCE Y’ALL sign. Covering up two small lines probably hadn’t even required an entire gallon of paint.
Friday rush-hour traffic had transformed southbound Interstate 71 into a parking lot, but business was light here alongside the northbound lanes. In fact, right now there were only two customers in the store and one of them stepped up to his register and slapped a package of potato chips and a soft drink on the counter.
“You got any old newspapers?” he asked, and his voice had a truly odd sound, an eerie rasp and rattle, like the brittle, whispery click of scarabs in some ancient Egyptian tomb. That’s not what got Scott’s attention, though. The man was what Scott’s grandfather liked to call “odoriferous.” He smelled ripe, like he hadn’t bathed in days and his clothes looked like he’d slept in them—more than one night. The skin around the black eye patch covering a missing eye was red and inflamed, and Scott wondered if infection was contributing to the miasma around the guy. Phew.
“No sir,” he said. He pointed to the racks that featured copies of the Cincinnati Inquirer, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Lexington Herald-Leader, and copies of Car and Truck and USA Today. “They bring us new copies every day and take back what we didn’t sell the day before.”
“So you wouldn’t have anything that had pictures of that school shooting a couple of weeks ago?”
“Oh, that!” Scott had saved copies of the coverage in both the Inquirer and the Courier Journal. Those were pieces of history.
Scott retrieved his backpack from under the counter, pulled several newspapers from it, and spread them out for the man to see.
Another man, a fat man who smelled equally rank, joined the one-eyed man, who was searching through the newspapers as if he were looking for something in particular.
“That must be him,” the one-eyed man said, pointing out to the fat man a picture of the police officer who had killed the gunman.
Then he started to tear the page with the picture out of the newspaper!
“Hey, wait a minute!” Scott said. “Those aren’t for sale. They’re my—”
Scott didn’t even realize he’d been grabbed. One second he was standing behind the register, and the next he was inches from the face of the one-eyed man, who had snatch
ed the front of his shirt and hauled him over the counter.
“This fella’s a grade school chum and I’m taking his picture with me,” he said, the stench of his breath overwhelming. “You got a problem with that, kid?”
Scott looked directly into the man’s eye for the first time, and suddenly the young man felt cold all over, not from the outside in—from the inside out. A primitive, irrational terror seized him and he was so frightened he could barely speak.
“No sir. Take the page. Take the whole newspaper. You can have anything you want.”
The man dropped Scott back over the counter as casually as tossing away a candy wrapper, gathered up the newspaper along with the chips and drink and walked toward the door with the fat man behind him. He hadn’t paid for the chips and drink, but Scott didn’t care. Scott would gladly pay for them out of his own pocket. He’d buy the guy the whole rack of chips just to get him out of the building.
The fat man stopped in the doorway and looked up at the big water tower.
“Have a nice day, ya’ll,” he said, and laughed. Or made a sound like laughter that had no mirth, no joy at all in it, a sound that was ugly, dark, and vulgar.
Scott’s hands shook for half an hour after the two men left. He felt like he’d been in great danger, that he’d barely escaped with his life—though he’d never tell anybody that, because a simple description of what had happened sounded almost innocent. But Scott knew.
He propped the door of the store open for the rest of the day to get the stink out of the building.
CHAPTER 27
The banner stretched seventy-five feet across the floor of the Fellowship Hall, proclaiming “Dancing with the Stars” in bright red, sparkling letters. Well, they would sparkle as soon as Emily painted them with Elmer’s Glue and poured glitter on them. First she had to get the helium canister to work so she could finish filling the balloons.
Every year, the church held a prom for handicapped teenagers. Emily was the chair of the committee that met on Saturdays to decorate. She loved the event, seeing the kids’ reactions when the limousines dropped them off, decked out in prom dresses and tuxedos. The ones with Down’s Syndrome were the best, their smiles lit their faces in something that Emily had always believed was an angelic glow.
But much as she loved the event, Emily did not want to be here working on it.
Not today. Not after the conversation she’d had Thursday night with Dan. And the text she’d gotten this morning from Jeff.
Her hand slipped on the valve of the canister and she chipped off the end of one of her flawlessly manicured nails.
“Don’t keep fussin’ with that thing or you’re not going to have a fingernail left,” Emma Perkins said.
Emma worked on the prom every year. Emily remembered how Emma’s granddaughter had looked last year, prom dress flowing out over the wheels of her wheelchair, her arms spastic from cerebral palsy, her mouth drooling the lipstick her mother had painted on her lips down off her chin. “I called Beatrice—you remember her, Beatrice Higginbotham, who lives down the street from me. Sometimes she comes to church with me on Easter Sunday. I told her, I said, ‘Bea, you need to send over your handyman to help us with these decorations even if you have to go down there and drag him out of the crawl space.’ She got a new furnace and has to have all the ductwork under her house changed.”
“In the fix-it department, Dan says he has only two tools,” Emily said. “The only two a man needs—a pen and a checkbook.”
Dan—who was being hunted by a demon.
She could not, would not think about that now! She shoved the thought resolutely out of her mind as all the other women chuckled at the wit of their charming young pastor.
Jeff was different, though. Jeff could fix anything.
The text from Jeff had been only one line—two words—but they touched her heart more than an eloquent speech.
“You Ok?”
No. Emily Burke was absolutely, most positively not Ok. She’d text him back as soon as she had some time to herself.
Emily gave up on the balloons and went to work putting glitter on the sign.
Not long afterward, the south door on the Fellowship Hall opened and a man peered in, said he was looking for Emily Burke. Emma practically squealed with delight when she saw him, rushed over and grabbed the man by the arm and dragged him to the helium canister, outlining in an unending, un-interruptible babble all the other handyman tasks they needed him to perform before he climbed back down into Beatrice’s crawl space. The man looked a little surprised—probably didn’t know there’d be that much to do, but he went right to work.
This late-afternoon decorating session had been a bad idea. Emily was tired—had slept hardly at all since Dan told her his bizarre story. But the rhythm of the mindless activity was soothing and Emily gradually relaxed as she slathered the red letters on the banner with glue and poured glitter on them. She remained on her knees on the floor so she wouldn’t have to look into anyone’s face as she worked.
Emily enjoyed where her thoughts took her. At least in the beginning she did. She recalled the glorious weekend she and Jeff had snatched together in Chicago in February. She’d told Dan she was going to the annual Christian Women’s Fellowship Convention. She’d gotten a copy of the convention’s agenda and called Dan every night, regaling him with stories about what this speaker or that had said. That part was easy enough. They said the same thing every year.
Other than those phone calls, Dan had never entered her mind. Jeff had filled up every moment, every thought, taking over her heart as inexorably as ink spreading out through a blotter.
She’d loved every moment she’d ever spent with Jeff. She loved his rakish tall-dark-and-handsome good looks, the cleft in his chin and his lithe, athlete’s body. Jeff was into kickboxing, had won national championship competitions.
She loved his crooked smile, the sound of his voice and—
Do you love Jeff Kendrick?
Emily hadn’t planned to go there! But it was too late now to back off. She’d gotten too close to the whirlpool and didn’t have the strength to resist being sucked in.
Well, do you?
Simple question, yes or no?
* * * * * * *
Theresa was mopping her kitchen floor, or making a show of it, pushing the mop back and forth. Didn’t seem like she had no energy at all anymore, hadn’t had since… She used to enjoy Saturday mornings, trying to get the house all clean quick as she could so she and Bishop could do whatever it was they had planned—a walk maybe, shopping or a movie matinee.
Now, she wasn’t even paying attention to mopping where the floor was sticky. At this rate, she’d still be cleaning when it was time to go to church tomorrow morning.
The sudden stench triggered a gag reflex so powerful Theresa had to clench her jaws shut tight to keep from spewing her breakfast all over the floor she’d just mopped. Then a wailing shriek drowned out all other sound. She dropped her mop and it clattered to the floor, then put her hands over her ears and shook her head slowly back and forth.
She watched her kitchen door open—Jack had told her she’d ought to lock it!—and stared in fascinated horror at what walked into the room. The man the boy Cole Stuart had grown up to be said nothing, merely looked at her—with only one eye. He had a patch over the other.
Theresa saw it then, the first time she ever had. Andi and Bishop could see demons. Becca could, too. Theresa had always been spared that part, could only hear and smell them. But when she looked up into the dead shark eye of the puppet on a string called Cole Stuart, she saw a haze around him—for a moment reminded Theresa of that Pigpen, the Charlie Brown character who walked around in a cloud of dust. This was more like a swarm of fat green flies. She could hear them buzzing, too, before the demon spoke.
“You’re going to help me find Becca,” the red-haired man in her kitchen said. Only, she heard the words as a rumble like gravel in a blender, mixed up with dying screams and shrieks of te
rror, moans of loss, cries of pain, all slathered over with pure evil. It was a sound that’d turn a body’s heart to pure stone.
She needed Bishop! He’d have known what to do. But Bishop was gone. She’d have to figure it out her own self now.
“Becca who?” she asked. In her head, the words sounded strong, sarcastic and defiant. But when they left her throat, they lost all authority, come out timid and scared. She pushed on, though. “I don’t know nobody named Becca. You go on, now, get on out of my kitchen. You ain’t welcome here.”
The man/thing laughed—a sound totally devoid of mirth or joy.
“Don’t remember her, huh?” He took another step into the room; the stench was overwhelming. “Then we’ll have do something to jog your memory, won’t we.”
When he started toward her, Theresa was afraid her knees were going to buckle and drop her in a heap on the floor. She wanted to scream, but couldn’t find the breath, or cry or run away or…
What would Bishop have done?
He wouldn’t have busted out bawling or tried to run off and hide! Bishop would have stood up to the demon—did stand up to it. And it had killed him.
Well, if that was the way of it, wouldn’t be long before she’d be seeing Bishop face to face.
“Ain’t nothing you can do to make me remember what I don’t know,” she said, and was glad her voice wasn’t shaking as hard as her insides was. Then she drew herself up tall as she could, forced herself to look that creature dead in its one eye. “But even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell the likes of you!”
It come at her then. The thing pounced, gobbled her up and the world went black.
* * * * * * *
Jack picked up a cup of coffee that tasted like battery acid/yak pee and took a sip. Then he tried to focus on the reports in front of him, but the words ran together on the page. And he couldn’t blame fatigue. When he left Theresa’s house Thursday night, he didn’t go home. He drove around the city aimlessly, looking at everything and nothing, trying not to think about anything at all, and after awhile the unceasing buzz in his head more resembled a dial tone than a heart monitor.
