by Gideon, John
This thought aroused disturbing recollections, ones he always shuffled to the back of his brain whenever they popped up, memories of those rare occasions on which he had gotten a psychic whiff of something “really evil,” as Mona would have termed it. Throughout his career as a forensic psychic he had encountered much ugliness, to be sure—the grisly leavings of child-killers, kidnappers, and serial murderers. But this comparatively routine brand of evil paled next to the kind that caused his guts to chum and his head to ache, the kind he had sensed only twice in his life.
From his earliest memory, Robinson Sparhawk had possessed the Gift, even as a freckled west-Texas lad who played with marbles and slingshots. He had never claimed to know how it worked, but he had fairly strong ideas about how it did not work. Spirits and ghosts had nothing to do with it, and most assuredly the Gift did not come from Satan.
Several years ago a fat-headed Assembly of God minister from Phoenix had charged that Robbie was a “creature of the Devil,” who was doing the Devil’s work. Robbie had countered with the fact that he had spent his entire adult life in the service of the lawful authorities, helping them locate missing people and putting the minds of bereaved families to rest. Did that sound like the work of a creature of Satan? Robbie had asked.
God works in strange ways, the minister had pronounced piously, and so does the Devil.
During his early childhood the Gift had never seemed very important to him. He simply possessed the ability to know things that he had no business knowing, and that was that. If one of his brothers lost a sack of marbles or a priceless baseball card, Robbie could usually find it without really trying, merely by using a feeling that came over him when he concentrated on the lost object. While his father was away fighting the war against Hitler, Robbie always knew exactly when a letter from the European Theater would arrive at the family home in El Paso. And once, just before the polio struck in 1945, his family lost its beloved golden retriever, whose name was Spike, and everyone feared that dognappers had pounced and spirited Spike away forever. While holding the dog’s leash in his hand, Robbie saw an image in his mind and ordered the family into the car. They motored outward from El Paso on Almeda Road, chasing a little boy’s vision of flowing water and shady trees. They found Spike in Ascarate Park on the bank of the Rio Grande, gamboling like a pup and chasing grasshoppers, just as Robbie had pictured in his mind. Though Robbie had been in school when the abduction occurred, the family accepted his explanation that two men had coaxed the dog out of the yard and into a pickup, and that Spike had bolted away into the park when the abductors had stopped on their way out of town.
Not until the following year, however, as he lay on his back with his meaningless legs stretched out on sweaty sheets, the fever having finally burned itself out, did his mother come to him for a serious talk about the Gift—the same ability that her grandfather had possessed. And her grandfather’s mother before him. And at least a dozen of the line before her.
Robbie must come to terms with it, his mother insisted. He must define its importance in his life and prepare himself for the trouble it could cause. The world was full of people who would readily ridicule and condemn what seemed out of the ordinary, or what they could not understand. He must steel himself against their cruelty. But at the same time he must recognize his responsibility to use the Gift for goodness. He must understand that different did not mean bad.
In the wake of that mother-son talk, Robbie’s feelings about his unusual ability changed. In his child’s mind he began to see the Gift as a substitute for his polio-ravaged legs—something he could stand on. Its importance grew as he discovered that he could use it to make a good living, that it exempted him from the study and the toil that the less gifted must suffer to ready themselves for day-to-day jobs. By the time he had established himself as a proven forensic psychic, he fully believed that the Gift would have become his staff of life even if he still had two good legs, despite what he had told Mona Kleiman and others so many times.
Life had been good, despite the loneliness. Robbie had long ago conquered any inclination toward self-pity. Though he had never overcome the longing to discover the joy of a woman’s love, he had learned to relish living on his own. He liked his work, the satisfaction it gave, and the certainty that he was using the Gift for goodness.
He zippered shut the L.L. Bean bag that lay on his bed, having stuffed it with folded ranch-style shirts, faded Wrangler jeans, underwear, socks, and shaving gear. The sound of the zipper set Katharine to whimpering and whining with anticipation. She knew that it signified packing, and packing meant that a ride was in the offing. Next to chicken enchiladas, there was nothing that she loved better than a ride in the Vanagon.
“Take it easy, old girl,” said Robbie, stooping from his crutches to scratch the underside of Katharine’s muzzle. “We ain’t goin’ anywhere till sunup.” Having administered a good scratching, he stood up again and wondered why he wasn’t feeling his usual sense of exhilaration over the prospect of heading out for a new job. Had Mona’s warning been that chilling?
Once again, unwanted memory stirred—a memory of something “really evil.” It would not go away.
Four years earlier he had received a call from the Clinton County sheriff in tiny Keyesport, Illinois, which lay roughly fifty miles east of St. Louis. Four children had disappeared over the span of two months, three little girls and a boy, all between the ages of seven and ten. The sheriff’s office lacked even the smell of a lead, so Robbie blew in to look things over.
While perusing some clothing that had belonged to the children, he received the definite impression that a body of water figured into the disappearances—which made sense, because Keyesport lay near a large one called Carlyle Lake. Still, Robbie was not getting his usual strong feelings, and this made him uneasy. It was as though some living presence had drawn a curtain of blackness over his psychic eyes.
He had told the sheriff that he wanted a boat, and the sheriff obliged with a nice big inboard-outboard, in which they motored away from the shore on a hot August afternoon. Robbie told the driver to halt about half a mile out, because he suddenly got the feeling that there was something important beneath the surface of the water, right there on that very spot. At the same time he felt a sick knot deep in his innards, a psychic anxiety that he had never felt before. The boat stopped, and he became dizzy. He made himself believe that it was only minor seasickness coupled with the effects of the engine fumes. A few seconds went by, and he felt vulnerable and exposed, yet he forced himself to lean over the transom and stare into the water.
What he saw turned his blood to sludge.
Later, when thinking about it, he could not say whether he had seen it with his eyes or with his mind, but regardless of how he saw it, he knew that it had awareness. It knew that he—Robinson Sparhawk of El Paso—was there in the boat. It knew why he had come. And it wanted him, just as it had wanted the children.
When he vomited into the water, the sheriff and his deputies assumed that he was seasick, since none of them had seen or felt anything unusual. They raced back to shore and delivered Robbie to a doctor. Robbie recovered quickly. He told the sheriff that he had made a mistake, that the lake had nothing to do with the disappearances—a lie that he hoped would save the lives of scuba divers who, if he had given the word, would have dived into the evil spot in Carlyle Lake. He could not bring himself, of course, to say anything about the insanity he had seen in the water.
And what, exactly, had he seen? he had often asked himself.
The answer defied words. An evil, more pure and potent than any mortal mind could ever imagine, an evil so intensely malevolent that it scorched his soul in the way liquid oxygen scorches bare skin—so cold that it was hot. He sensed it could do great harm, both physical and spiritual, that it could have eaten his soul.
But this time was not the first time. On one other occasion he had come face-to-face with the blackness, and the terror so numbed his mind that the recol
lections were now fuzzy and indistinct, for which he was thankful. On a few other occasions he had sort of brushed near it while poking into mysterious disappearances, and he had simply gotten the hell out—quit the cases with no discussion, no argument.
Meaning to get a good night’s sleep and to leave for Greely’s Cove with the rising sun, he pulled off his jeans and boots and hit the sack. Katharine plunked her heavy bones down in her customary spot at the foot of the bed. Sleep, however, did not come easily.
Mona Kleiman’s warning buzzed in his mind. Though he could not take seriously the Old Truth propounded by the pagan witches, he could not discount the reality of his own experiences. There was such a thing as evil, something far more potent than the human insanities that drove child-killers and serial murderers. It was evil in the atmospheric sense, a kind of cloud that hung around certain people, places, and things, something he could damn near smell.
Maybe the ways of witches were not delightful craziness after all, he worried. It was this worry that kept him awake into the small hours of the morning.
12
For Sandy Cunningham Zolten, the ten days since her daughter’s disappearance had seemed like ten consecutive eternities. Each had ushered in a new brand of hell: pungent terror in the first days, with visions of the unspeakable agonies Teri might be suffering; then the progressive decay of all hope as Stu Bromton’s search ground to a weary halt; and finally the bleak weight of numb depression, broken now and again by stabbing fits of self-blame.
I should never have let her go out! Sandy had screamed silently to herself at least a thousand times. Big deal, if my daughter calls me an old witch behind my back! I should have played the wicked stepmother, the jailor, the uncaring old bag! Teri would have been madder than a wet hen, of course, had Sandy kept her in on that rainy night, but this would have been a small price to pay.
“Are you sure you want to work the desk tonight?” asked Ken, having finished checking out the till of the Old Schooner Motel. His face had grown noticeably thin, and pouches had formed under his tired eyes. He had been burning his candle at both ends, participating in the search until it finally halted in hopeless failure, then running the motel virtually by himself. Yet he had managed to be on hand to comfort his wife in the dark hours of each waning hell.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she answered, lighting a Merit. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.” She went to the tiny Sony color television set that sat in a corner of the alcove behind the front desk and snapped it on. Seattle’s KOMO-TV was wrapping up the eleven o’clock news, so she flipped through the channels—The Best of Johnny Carson, Night Heat, Night line, sappy old movies. Nothing seemed appetizing.
“If that’s what you want, Sweets,” said Ken, bending to kiss her cheek. “But come to bed at one o’clock, okay? If somebody wants a room after that, they can ring the bell.” He took his nylon parka from the closet and slipped it on, because a hard rain had been falling on Greely’s Cove since early afternoon. Sandy noticed that his movements had lost their sureness, that his arms seemed laden with invisible weights of lead. An old mans movements, an old mans arms, she thought with a pang as he ambled toward the door. He was not yet forty, but the ten eternities had worked their evil magic on Ken, too.
“I’ll be in at one sharp,” she said. “If you’re still awake I’ll make us some hot chocolate.”
He turned and smiled thinly, as she knew he would. “That’ll be nice. I doubt that I’ll be asleep yet.”
“Kenny,” she said, causing him to turn back toward her again, “we’ve got to start putting it together again, don’t we?” He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”
He just stood there, his shoulders weary and hunched, like a servant waiting to be dismissed. God, how Sandy hated seeing him like this, and she knew that he was feeling the same about her. Their return to the routine chores of running the motel had been a purely physical thing, not as therapeutic as they had hoped it would be.
“We know what the outcome will be, don’t we?” she said. “I mean, we shouldn’t be kidding ourselves, should we? Our daughter is gone, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we’ll become real people again.”
“Real people again,” he repeated, and his eyes filled with tears. This was the first time Sandy had ever seen her husband cry, and the sight tortured her. He was crossing an emotional bridge that they both had prayed to be spared. “I’ll make the effort if you will,” he said, forcing the little smile again. “We’ll do it together. We’ll do it for each other.”
“And for Amber,” Sandy added, her vocal cords straining. “And for Amber,” he confirmed. “G’night, Sweets.” He turned and moved through the rear door, heading across the parking lot and the alley toward their white stucco house with its five bedrooms and middle-of-the-line furniture—a house that had abruptly become too big and too quiet.
Sandy stepped into the tiny rest room of the motel office and repaired her makeup, which a flash flood of tears had savaged. The image in the mirror told her that she, like her husband, had lost weight, but not in the right places—mostly in her face and neck, where the skin appeared slightly loose and sallow. Her green eyes, normally snapping with vitality, seemed hooded and dull, which no amount of eyeliner or shadow could cure. Only her flaming red hair, carefully combed and shaped around her once-plump face, had survived the ten preceding days unscathed.
She brewed a pot of coffee, then plopped down with a steaming cup in the armchair behind the desk. She gazed senselessly at the TV screen, scarcely noticing what program she was watching. Curiously, she felt a tentative sense of peace come over her. She and Ken had crossed an important line just now, merely by exchanging a few words. They had accepted. They had firmed up their alliance with each other. They had resolved to make a new beginning, though each would cling to a remnant of hope that Teri would someday come back to them. Hope and acceptance would survive side by side—a small, self-contradictory miracle that would enable the Zoltens to get back to the business of living.
Sandy must have dozed, for she suddenly became aware that the channel she had been watching was playing the national anthem in preparation to go off the air. A glance at the clock on the back wall of the motel office amazed her: It was 12:55. Her coffee cup, half-full and smudged with her lipstick, lay cold and untouchable on the desk next to her arm.
At least I got a little sleep, she remarked to herself, massaging her neck. I needed it.
She snapped off the television set and stood up, feeling a little uneasy in the thick silence that had descended with the ending of the “Star Spangled Banner.” While stretching she thought she heard something, a fleeting crescendo of rainy sound, as though someone had briefly opened the rear door that led out to the parking lot. She stood still a moment, her elbows raised above her shoulders in the act of stretching. Her nose twitched with a faint whiff of something gangrenous.
Her eyes swept the small motel lobby, which was softly lit by a pair of table lamps at either end of a rather gaudy blue sofa. Nothing seemed amiss. End tables and padded armchairs sat in their assigned spots. A rack of travel brochures stood against the far wall, next to an Early American console TV on which guests often watched the Today Show while munching their complementary breakfast rolls. The only sound was the steady patter of cold rain and the buzz of the neon sign above the door, which rendered VACANCY in pink.
Something made Sandy move off the spot onto which she had been frozen, a nibbling apprehension that edged her through the waist-high gate at one end of the counter. She let the gate snap shut behind her and stood still, listening hard to the silence.
Another breath of that awful smell waved by her nostrils, and she wrinkled her nose: What on earth could it be? During the past two days she had scoured, vacuumed, dusted, or disinfected every inch of the lobby and office, needing physical work. The place had still smelled vaguely of Formula 409 when she came to spell Ken on the night shift.
Had she missed something? A barrel of rotting fish, maybe,
or a closetful of dead cats? She tried to smile at the absurdity.
Her brain clicked into high gear: Stu Bromton’s investigative report had included a reference to a “strong stench” in the car that Teri had been driving on the night of her disappearance. Also, the police had taken a sample of a slimy, moldlike substance on the passenger’s seat and had sent it to a Seattle crime laboratory for analysis. The results were expected shortly. Had the stench in Anita Solheim’s new Toyota been similar to the odor that now tickled Sandy’s own nose? Or, by some unfathomable twist of cosmic reality, could it be the same one?
Sandy would have shaken off these incredible notions, blaming them on her battered emotional state, if the lights had not suddenly gone out.
Hannabeth Hazelford’s cottage stood in the oldest residential quarter of Greely’s Cove—a stately, woody neighborhood called Torgaard Hill. In the early days the Hill had been a bastion of old money, where sea captains and shipping executives had built dignified Victorian and Tudor houses with views of the Puget Sound. Hannie’s cottage boasted a lavishly landscaped yard with towering cedars and sprawling madronas, beds of rosebushes and manicured clumps of azaleas.
At the tick of 1:00 a.m. on February 19, 1986, Hannie’s place was dark, as was the rest of the neighborhood. This was a weeknight, and the modern-day residents of Torgaard Hill were either retirees or working people who needed their sleep. But Hannie was not sleeping. In a corner room of her quaint house, behind shuttered and curtained windows that allowed not a trace of candlelight to escape into the rainy night, she sat alone at a special table, naked and scrawny as an elderly reptile. Had any of her neighbors or friends been present, they would not have recognized her, for she was without her elaborate blond wig and turquoise contact lenses. She had washed away her thick makeup, having no need to hide the embrangled wrinkles and creases in her face. Her ancient skull was shiny and splotchy, only faintly haired with gauzy wisps of white. Clipped to her nose was a shiny set of pince-nez with thick lenses that magnified her watery eyes beyond grotesquerie.
