I figured there was a good chance that Patty, with recourse to some rational-sounding excuse, had started rechecking the locks on her doors at night. If she had a shred of faith, she’d probably started wearing some kind of religious symbol. I wondered what it would be. A crucifix, maybe? She did have something of the lapsed Catholic vibe, but so did a lot of people who’d simply walked away from organized religion. Right before she went to sleep, when the moon slipped behind a cloud and heavy darkness settled, I bet she wondered if I was for real.
That sliver of doubt, the niggling possibility that I might be telling her the absolute truth, and the DNA-level memory of when demons walked openly in the world, kept her from dismissing me. It gave her the latitude she needed to indulge my, all things considered, innocuous requests. On the conscious level, though, I think she just liked the fact that I’d beat the hell out of Tucker Smith. Whatever the reason, she was willing to help me. That was enough.
“Is this going to become a full-time occupation for you, Hartworth? Or is there a conclusion to this little project sometime in the near future?”
The question did a lot to dampen my moderately good mood. “Day or two, I think. Three on the outside.”
She gave me a surprised look. “Why do you say that?”
“Abby’s set to get out of the hospital.”
“And?”
“If something’s going to happen, it’ll happen then.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“I thank God, Jesus, Buddha, all the My Little Ponies, and Santa Claus for good measure. Then, I move on.”
“Really? Just like that?”
“Why Deputy Patty, I think you’re saying you’ll miss me.”
“Pshhh,” she said, but she flashed me a grin. “Well, maybe a little. You’re weird, but that’s fun sometimes.”
“That’s fair.”
Patty face went serious. “What if something does happen?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say it in a very loud voice.
“Damn it, I told you…”
“You won’t tolerate a vigilante. You won’t have to. It won’t be that kind of thing.”
A voice drawled behind me. “How do you know that?”
I resisted the impulse to spin into a kick. It took a second, but I recognized the sheriff’s voice. I shot Patty a look, but she seemed as surprised to see him as I was to find him there. The sheriff stepped past me and regarded Patty with an inscrutable expression. She met his eyes without shame or embarrassment. Either she had titanium nerves or she really didn’t think she’d crossed a line.
After I thought about it for a second, I realized she hadn’t. I hadn’t asked her to break any laws, and when you got right down to it, there was nothing all that sinister about asking for a tour of a high school. Hell, I’d asked law enforcement to make it happen. It only felt sleazy to me because I knew the ghastly stakes and kept the information to myself.
The sheriff turned his inscrutable expression to me. “Well, Mr. Hartworth. How do you know it won’t be that kind of thing?”
I didn’t jump into an answer. I cleared my mind and waited to see what came up first. After a few seconds, I knew what I needed to say.
“Insight, sheriff.”
Barnes blinked at that and then frowned. “So you found what you were looking for?”
“Not exactly, but I learned enough.”
Barnes never took his eyes off me when he spoke to Patty. “I’ll take it from here, Deputy.”
She looked at him and then me. I could see the confusion and the suspicion in her eyes. On the other hand, he hadn’t exceeded his authority in taking over any more than she had exceeded hers in agreeing to take me on a tour. She hesitated. The sheriff narrowed his eyes in her direction. I caught her eye and shook my head.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
The sheriff didn’t say anything until after Patty was gone. “I went to school here.”
“So I heard.”
“Hate the place,” he said in a hard voice.
“Heard that too.”
“Looked into you, you know.”
“I figured. If not right off the bat, then certainly after you caught wind of that Miami business.”
“Yeah. Thing is, nobody knows what to make of you. Talked to one fellow out in Los Angeles.”
“Christ,” I muttered.
Barnes gave me knowing look. “He said you’re the biggest pain in the ass alive. Said you’re probably a liar and definitely a con man.”
“We’ve had some issues.”
“Gathered that. He told me something else.”
“I’m sure it was very flattering.”
The sheriff grunted something that might have been a laugh.
“He said if you’re fixating,” the sheriff blinked a few times. “That’s a strange word. Anyway, he said if you’re fixating, best thing to do is stay the hell out of your way until it’s done. Now, why would he say a thing like that?”
I rolled a shoulder. “Experience.”
“That’s what he said, too. Wouldn’t say another word about it. Just, ‘Stay the hell out of Hartworth’s way. It’s less paperwork.’”
“He isn’t wrong,” I said.
“Talked to another fellow in Boston. He says you’re some kind of exorcist or monster hunter. Used those very words, ‘monster hunter,’ like it made sense.”
I stared at the sheriff. He stared up at the school with something just shy of blinding hatred. He’d barely glanced at me since Patty left. He’d talked to someone in Boston. I could only think of one person in Boston who might have called me a monster hunter.
“You talked to Father Ryan?”
“I did.”
I was impressed. “That’s no mean feat. He’s been,” I hedged, “in seclusion for a while.”
Barnes raised an eyebrow at me. He’d talked to Father Ryan. He knew exactly where the man was and probably why he was there. Most people don’t line up to get into mental institutes. Fewer still line up to get in voluntarily. Like I said, I have baggage. Father Ryan and his choice of where to live were part of it.
I felt defensive. “I didn’t put him in there.”
“I know that, boy. He told me that much. Not much else. Given how many people you seem to meet, awful lot of not talking about you going on.”
“I’m a private sort of person. People respect that.”
“Hell they do. You scare them.”
I winced. It was true, but it wasn’t true. Yeah, I was all tied up with what scared them, a lot like I was all tied up with Helena’s attachment, but it didn’t make them afraid of me.
“It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not me that scares them.”
“If you say so. Found out a few other things.”
“Oh?”
“Stories about you go way back, fifteen years or so, all over the country. Near as I can figure, save for a year in Connecticut, you’ve never had a home for more than a few months. You literally live on the road.”
“I like to travel.”
Barnes sniffed at me. “No, you don’t. Not the way you do it.”
“Force of habit, then. Look, sheriff, not to be rude, but is this coming to a point?”
Barnes turned and faced me then. He seemed calm, disturbingly, unnaturally calm.
“Before I let you walk into that building, I want to know what you are. You a con man, a liar, an exorcist?”
“Probably.”
Barnes narrowed his eyes. “Which?”
“All of them. I’ve been a lot of things and done a lot of things over the years.”
The sheriff nodded, slowly, and then fixed me with a steady look. “I expect that’s true. So tell me this. Who were you before you stole the name Adrian Hartworth?”
Bone-deep fear tried to claw its way out of my chest, but I kept it off my face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not stupid, Hartworth, or whoever you really are. Got my degree i
n Criminology. Been a cop for most of my life. Oh, your paperwork is solid, better than solid. I can’t prove you aren’t who you say you are. Doesn’t mean I don’t know you aren’t Adrian Hartworth. You became him fifteen years ago.”
I didn’t flinch or avert my eyes. He could know all he wanted, but, like the man said, he couldn’t prove any of it. I spread my hands in a ‘what can you do?’ sort of way.
“Even if that were true,” I said, “and I’m not saying it is, what difference would it make today?”
“Maybe none, but maybe it makes a lot of difference. Depends on why you did it.”
I did avert my eyes that time.
“If I changed my identity, it wasn’t for a reason that would matter to you right now.” I met his gaze again. “It was because of family.”
I’d even told him the truth. The first time I changed my identity, it was because of family. I did it to protect them. The second time was about family, too, but in a very different way. Whatever the sheriff expected, that wasn’t it. He believed me, though. I saw that much. I watched his eyes flicker back and forth. He was redoing all of the mental math that made him certain I was a criminal on the run and probably running some kind of long con on Paul and Abby. He’d expected me to lie and spin some convoluted tale, to say something he could use to catch me in the falsehood or ferret out my real identity as a crook.
“Why should I believe that?” He asked.
“You already do,” I answered. “You aren’t the only one who can read people.”
Barnes grimaced. “Losing my touch.”
“Nah, I’m just an observant guy.”
“I just bet that you are.”
I glanced up at the school. “So, I’ve answered your questions, more or less. Are you satisfied?”
“Enough, I suppose. Enough for now.”
“Good. Then do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why do you hate this school so much?”
Barnes folded his arms across his chest and looked at the ground for a spell. I couldn’t tell if he was gathering his thoughts or putting on some kind of passive-aggressive show. The older man turned his head and looked up at the old church. I saw tension gathering in his shoulders and back. Just being in proximity to the building stressed the man out. No, I realized, as the truth crystallized in my head. He didn’t hate the place. It didn’t stress him out. Barnes was afraid of the building.
“Couldn’t rightly say,” said Barnes. “Always hated it. Hated it when I was in school. Hate it now. Wish the town had torn the damn place down instead of making it a school.”
I doubt that he would have much liked the result if the town had torn it down. I thought that, all things considered, it wasn’t the building the man hated. What he hated was what he sensed in the building. The malevolence of a demon, any demon, was nothing to scoff at, let alone the malevolence of something as powerful as what the Twins had described to me. Tearing the building down might have been enough to free the demon, regardless of any other measures put in place to contain it.
Barnes face settled into grim determination. “Damn it, let’s just get this over with.”
With that, the sheriff turned and walked toward the front door. I followed after him, quite certain that I wasn’t doing the smart thing. It might have been a necessary thing, but it wasn’t the smart thing. I checked a laugh at my lips. It wasn’t amusement, just a bit of hysteria. I’d been doing the stupid thing since word go. No point in worrying about doing the smart thing at that point.
Chapter 34
Some people seem able to retain perfectly good, accurate memories that are immune to the influence of fear. Some seem able to do that even when faced with the near blind panic I experienced one second after stepping through the front door of the school. I am not one of those people. Generate sufficient fear and my memory started to develop big holes that, even in retrospect, were filled with something that could make me sweat. I don’t have a single clear memory about my tour through that school. I have hazy, nightmarish recollections of halls and doors and Barnes telling me things about the school. I couldn’t tell you what the things he told me were, but I remember his mouth moved and noises came out. I remember thinking that they probably strung together into coherent thoughts.
The fear that spent a full thirty minutes raking its way across my mind and heart didn’t even allow me to experience satisfaction over being right. I guess my little plea to the Almighty got jammed up in the queue somewhere. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’m told he’s a busy guy. That being said, I knew what we were up against. Somewhere in my truest heart, I’d wanted to think I was wrong. I’d wanted to think I’d misread the signs. Like everyone else, I wanted things that I wasn’t going to get.
The absolute darkness of the place enveloped me the second I was inside. It felt the way dank, standing water smells, full of putrefaction and death. It pulsed and quivered against me, my mind, my senses, and I wanted to scream. I wanted to run away. I just wanted to get out. I tried to imagine how they got teenagers to come to the place at all, let alone for months and months every year. To spend most of your waking hours wrapped in that absolute, stomach-wrenching awfulness, that kind of spiritual blight, would be enough to drive some people mad. It would turn others, those inclined that way, to crime and outright evil.
If someone had told me that there were an unusually high percentage of serial killers spawned from those hallways, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. In fact, I’d have probably said they were underestimating the number. Every step through that building was like wading, fully immersed, through the week-old discarded flesh of a slaughterhouse. Don’t ask me how I managed not to sob. I don’t know. Maybe I did and Barnes just did me the courtesy of not mentioning it. By the time we stepped back outside, I was shell-shocked into visceral, mental, and emotional numbness. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back inside.
I stood there, shaking a little, not hearing or feeling anything. I just wanted to close down, huddle into a tiny ball and stay that way for a year. They send their kids there, I thought. They sent their children into that cesspit. They did it on purpose. How could they do that? How could they not know? How could they be in that building for more than a second before boarding-up the doors and windows and declaring it a public hazard? I’d have put up thirty-foot fences, topped with spikes and razor wire and fucking machine gun turrets, just to keep people out.
I thought that I’d never be clean again. I was stained, forever, just by having come into contact with that corruption. And they sent their kids there. They sent their kids there every day. My God, what have they done? I have no idea how long I stood there, insensate, or how many times Barnes said my name before he grabbed my arm and gave me a firm shake.
“Hartworth,” he growled. “For God’s sake man, snap out of it.”
I shuddered and nodded. My legs felt weak, but I made them propel me, unsteady and listing from side to side, toward my car. The Neon looked like it was a thousand miles away, but I kept moving toward it. I heard Barnes moving behind me, asking me something, but I just needed to get away from that building. I made it as far as the front of my car before everything in my stomach raced up my throat. I stumbled and dropped to a knee, one hand against the car, the other on the ground, and I puked my guts out. I vomited for centuries. That’s how my brain interpreted it, anyways. In the real world, it might have gone on for twenty or thirty seconds. Once my stomach realized there just wasn’t anything left to send upwards, it subsided.
I stayed on the ground like that for a minute, trembling and certain that I might get sick again at any moment. I’ll never be clean again, I thought for the second time. I’ll never get that stench, that wrongness, I’ll never get it off me. There wasn’t enough soap or acid in the whole world to get that evil off me. Oh God, how had Abby ever made herself go inside that building? How could anyone go in there more than once?
“Hartworth?”
I looked
up. The sheriff was looking down at me, all the cop suspicion gone. He just looked worried about me. It was regular human concern for another person that was in obvious distress. I looked down at the ground for a minute, saw my own vomit, and had to fight down an urge to be sick again. I pushed myself up from the ground and sat down on the hood of my car.
“I’ll be alright,” I mumbled.
“You sure?” Barnes sounded like he’d heard that one before and didn’t believe it this time either.
“Yeah. Something I ate, I guess. Teach me for eating gas station food.”
“Uh-huh.”
I gave him a wan look and focused on steadying my nerves. New plan, I thought. Take The Twins’ advice. Run away. Barnes didn’t leave. He waved on a handful of kids who stopped to gawk. I caught sight of some soccer cleats. It took about ten minutes, but I got myself together. I found a bottle of water in the car and rinsed out my mouth. The sheriff watched me with a neutral expression. Once it became clear I wasn’t about to die, the cop part of his brain started reasserting itself.
“Care to share what you learned from that?” Barnes asked.
I gave the man a level look. “Sure. I learned it’s time for me to go.”
Barnes tilted his head to one side, like he didn’t quite understand. “Sorry?”
“Not complicated. I’m leaving. Nothing left for me to do here.”
“You don’t strike me as a man who leaves things unfinished.”
“Sheriff, I told you the second I thought people would be better off if I left, I’d go. People will be better off. So, I’m going.”
Granted, the people who would be better off were pretty much just me and Helena. Paul and Abby might be better off, if I could somehow convince Paul to take Abby and leave. People underestimate the value of the strategic retreat. On very rare occasions some fool emerged victorious from a fight they had no business winning. The infrequency of such victories accounted for their celebration. Most of the time, when someone walked into an unwinnable fight, they died. I had no intention of being that guy. I checked-in with my conscience and discovered I could live quite easily with my cowardice. Mostly, I’d be able to live with it because I lived. Bravery was noble. Suicide by demon was just stupid.
The Midnight Ground Page 22
