Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  Catherine discovered it was fairly easy to sculpt the greenish-white ectoplasm she exuded into a crude semblance of the lost heiress. In fact, the hardest thing she had to do was keep from laughing out loud whenever Mrs. Thorne, weeping and babbling endearments, tried to touch the weird puppet as it bobbed over the tabletop.

  While Mrs. Thorne was a devout believer, Mr. Thorne, on the other hand, was not pleased by his wife’s insistence on pumping money into what he saw as a two-bit scam. He was especially outraged to find his wife’s name associated with the Wheeles in the supermarket tabloids. Yet, despite his opinion of the Wheeles, the industrialist never threatened to expose them.

  Zebulon was sixty, she was forty-four, and they had been married twenty-eight years. They had a house in Palm Springs, a mansion in Beverly Hills and a holiday bungalow in Belize. They had their own mobile video unit and a state-of- the-art television studio. Zebulon’s voice was heard on over one hundred radio stations in the continental United States and the syndicated Wheeles of God was seen by an estimated 2.5 million viewers every week. Their ministry boasted over one hundred paid employees, and Zebulon was in constant demand as a lecturer at conservative Christian rallies. The walls of their home were covered with photographs of him in the company of politicians, movie stars, ex-presidents and dictators. They had it all, with no end in sight for the foreseeable future. So it came as something of a surprise when Zeb told her he wanted a divorce.

  “Are you crazy? Do you honestly think the rubes who watch our show instead of going to church are going to stand for you divorcing me? The ratings—not to mention the love offerings—will fall through the floor! And why now, for the love of God? We haven’t lived as husband and wife for fifteen years. What’s the rush?”

  “I’m in love, Kathy-Mae, for the first time in my life.”

  She winced when he said that. She’d always suspected Zebulon’s interest in her always had more to do with her gift, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed having it rubbed in her face. She also disliked it when he called her by her real name. It usually meant trouble.

  “What is it this time? Have you knocked up another one of your precious little secretaries?”

  His face paled. “What are you going to do?”

  She folded her arms, looking at him with new interest. “If I didn’t know better, Zeb, I’d swear you were serious about this one. It sure as hell never bothered you when I fixed up the others with that quack in Tijuana.”

  “That was different, Kathy-Mae. I’m not as young as I used to be. A man wants to leave something of him behind. It’s only natural.”

  “You didn’t say that when I had the miscarriage.” Her voice was very still as she remembered the contractions she’d suffered in the back of the old school bus that had been their home during the early days on the road, and how he’d refused to take her to the hospital. “You said a child would be in the way; that a baby would hold us back.”

  “Things have changed, Kathy-Mae.”

  “You’re damn right they’ve changed! You’re Zebulon Wheele, God’s gift to modern man! Champion of the Lord’s will and hero to thousands of ignorant shit-kickers all over this grand nation! You’re no freer to run off and marry some slut you’ve been screwing between the filing cabinets than the president is to take a shit on the White House lawn!”

  Zebulon’s anger overcame his fear. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. He was madder than she’d ever seen him. She felt a sick thrill of lust build inside her. It was their first unrehearsed physical contact in years. “You’re a goddamn freak!” he shouted, spittle flying in her face. “You don’t belong with decent folk! You’ve got no heart and love in you! You’re some kind of monster pretending at being human. But I tell you one thing, Kathy-Mae, I’m not letting you spoil this for me!”

  “You’re right, Zeb,” she replied with a frightful calm. “I don’t belong with decent people. I belong with you. Who is she, Zeb? Tell me now and I’ll forget all about this and we can get back to business.”

  Zebulon’s answer was a stinging backhanded blow to her cheek. She tasted the blood pooling in her mouth. She had given him his chance, so what followed wasn’t her fault. She could have read his mind any point of their relationship, but something always made her hang back. Perhaps it was simple fear of what he’d do if he found out she’d been peeping inside his head. Or maybe she simply didn’t want to know what he really thought about her. But now he had given her no choice. She had never read the mind of anyone who was aware that she was doing so. If he decided to fight her, it would only complicate things and make it harder on himself.

  As she stepped into her husband’s mind, she found herself surrounded by memories, both fresh and badly faded. There was Zebulon shaking hands with a local politician, Zebulon eating at a cheap lunch counter outside of Topeka in 1970, Zebulon consummating their marriage, a dim glimpse of breast and nipple as seen by a nursing infant, a pretty girl smiling and placing his trembling hand on the gentle swelling of her bared belly ...

  Follow that one!

  The fool tried to block her attempt to trace the memory farther back. It was a noble gesture, but, ultimately a futile one. Still, she had to acknowledge that he fought her as hard as he could—and took it to a level she never would have thought he was willing to go. Just as she snatched the girl’s name and face from his memory, there was a deafening roar, as if a dam had suddenly given way. Zebulon had triggered a massive cerebral hemorrhage in a last ditch attempt to block her mind scan. She had never been inside a mind during a catastrophic blowout, and she wasn’t eager to find out what would happen should she get caught in the blast.

  She was still disentangling herself from his skein of memory when Zebulon’s databanks simultaneously emptied themselves, disgorging a mass of stored conversations, old television shows, bank-account numbers, quotes from the Bible, excerpts from Houdini’s handbooks and snippets of popular song. A thousand voices, each replayed at different speeds, washed over her. She panicked, terrified of being drowned in the minutiae of her husband’s life. As the initial flood of information receded, she realized one by one, the voices were dying out. Zebulon’s memory had bled itself dry. The silence that followed was like the hiss of blank magnetic tape.

  When she reopened her eyes, she found Zebulon sprawled on the floor at her feet. She called Ezra and told him Zeb had suffered a stroke when his most recent mistress demanded that he divorce Catherine and marry her or she’d go to the papers with the story about their lovechild. Ezra was properly shocked and called for an ambulance. Zebulon died in the hospital three days later, without regaining consciousness. Ezra issued a press release, citing the televangelist’s collapse as the result of too much praying. The death of a church secretary named Mary Beth Mullins, whose car’s brakes failed while attempting to merge onto the Interstate, was mentioned on page twelve.

  When she looked into the gilt-edged coffin and saw Zebulon’s lifeless body, she experienced the same giddy satisfaction she’d known when she realized her parents were dead. She was finally free to shape the ministry in her image. Oh, she’d play the game and be the grief-stricken widow, as was expected of her. But once her period of mourning was over, she’d make them forget all about Zebulon Wheele.

  Now that she was unencumbered by her husband’s petty jealousy and unwillingness to share the spotlight, she began to give the sheep lining to be sheared exactly what they wanted: bigger and better miracles. The Ultimate Healing was the most daring step ever taken by a television preacher. The knowledge that Zebulon would never have allowed such an exhibition pleased her. It was too dangerous, too controversial. And most damning of all, it smacked of the geek show.

  The legitimate press accused her of bringing the carny into the church. It didn’t matter to her what outsiders did or didn’t think about the Ultimate Healing. She always made sure to use a ringer and fake blood when professional debunkers were in the audience, so as not to draw the attention of scientists. The last thing she needed was
to be snatched up by some shadowy government agency and put under observation. As long as the faithful were convinced she was performing first-class miracles and the professional media dismissed her as a sideshow hustler, everything was fine.

  She usually picked terminal cases without immediate family or close friends for the Ultimate Healings. After all, they were going to die anyway. Who would notice—or even care—if they died shortly after having an unsterilized hand thrust inside their bodies? That simply meant the supplicant’s faith had failed and the disease returned. The blame lay with the patient, not the healer. Of course there was the time she’d gone in to remove a tumor and ended up yanking out the guy’s gall bladder instead. But that wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t a doctor, was she?

  The Ultimate Healing was tasteless, grotesque, and insulting. The sheep loved it. Within six weeks of the first public demonstration, she’d reclaimed the ten television stations who’d dropped The Wheeles of God Hour upon Zeb’s death and added seven more. Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen! Step this way and for the price of twenty-five cents, a mere quarter of a dollar, you can see the Amazing Geek bite the heads off live chickens and snakes! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

  The only thing that spoiled her new-found happiness was the fact that Zebulon was monitoring her sermons. He sat right in the front row, dressed in the powder-blue polyester suit she buried him in, his arms folded and legs crossed. The left side of his face drooped, like a mask made from wax and kept too close to an open flame. He looked awful when he smiled. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d brought her family with him. She had to keep from staring at the members of the congregation seated near the front, who were blissfully unaware of the ghosts balanced in their laps.

  Sometimes Zebulon would lean over and say something to Papa, who would nod his head very gingerly, since Mama had done such a good job with the knife he was afraid of it coming off. She was glad she couldn’t hear what they were talking about.

  Still, as annoying as Zebulon’s haunting of her might be, he was only a shadow and she had nothing to fear from him. No, her real problems stemmed from that damned Blue woman. She should have known there’d be trouble when she first saw the Brit. What was his name again? Chastity? Chisum?

  Just thinking of that leering little bastard was enough to make her mad. Up until she met him, she’d imagined she was unique, save for Zebulon and his paltry psychic gift. Then this swaggering jerk walks in and throws her world out of balance. The most irritating thing about him, though, was that while he possessed a tenth of her power, the Brit had succeeded in outfoxing her.

  She remembered how he sat slumped in the chair in her office, toying with a paperweight as he spoke. “I got an once-in-a-lifetime deal for you, Sister. A real golden opportunity. There’s this bird I know—schizzy as hell—who says she’s Denise Thorne. Yeah, I thought that might snap your garters.”

  “Denise Thorne is dead.”

  “How are you to know?” he grinned snidely. “Talk to her anytime recent, have you? You can fool the old ladies with that bollocks, but not me. I know what you are better than you do, duck.”

  She tried to ensnare him with her mind, but to her surprise, he darted away. She made another attempt to grab him, only to have him slip past her again. And again. She felt like a grizzly bear fishing for minnows. She could overpower him, as she had Zeb, but not without fusing his synapses and ending up with nothing.

  “Tsk-tsk! So much horsepower and all you’ve got is a learner’s permit,” he sneered. “Now, are we going to cut a deal or do we have to run around Robin Hood’s barn some more?”

  Her cheeks reddened. It was as if she was back at the Hit-the-Cats booth, and she didn’t like that at all.

  “Half a million, that’s all I’m asking. Not much for the whereabouts of a multi-millionaire’s long-lost daughter, wouldn’t you say? I’ll lead you right to her. What you do with her once you’ve got her... Well, that’s your problem, eh?”

  Ezra was against the plan from the start. He was convinced the Brit was just out for a quick buck. But she knew he was telling the truth. There was no way she could possibly explain that to Ezra in a way he’d understand, so she didn’t try. He didn’t like it, but he went ahead and paid off the Brit. Ezra was right about the bastard not being trustworthy, of, course, but he never got the chance to say ‘I told you so’.

  They were sitting in the car, watching from a distance as the Brit met the Blue woman, the one he said was Denise Thorne. She couldn’t see what was going on too clearly, but it looked as if he kissed her greeting. The Blue woman abruptly staggered backward, clutching her stomach, and the Brit was gone, as if swallowed by the shadows. Ezra signaled for the Wheelers in the second car to join him and together they spilled onto the deserted playground, leaving her to watch from the safety of the Lincoln.

  The Blue woman was on one knee, arms wrapped around her gut. The tranquilizer should have knocked her out within seconds, but she was still moving. Ezra was the first one to reach her. He knelt beside her in an attempt to identify her as the missing heiress. It was the last thing he did.

  The Blue woman thrust her fingers into his sad brown eyes, puncturing them like overripe grapes, and then slammed the flat of her palm into the bridge of his nose, sending slivers of bone and cartilage into his brain. Ezra was killed instantly. Catherine knew this because she heard his brain shut off as neatly as if someone had pulled the plug on a radio.

  Ezra was dead. No, not dead. Murdered. The initial shock quickly turned to anger. She had not felt such raw emotion since the night Papa raped her and Sally changed her life forever. She grabbed the Blue woman’s mind and squeezed, and sending the contents squirting out like toothpaste. There was too much for her to fully assimilate, but there was enough for her to corroborate that this creature had once, indeed, been Denise Thorne. There was also a lot of confusing garbage about ‘Pretending people’, someone called Morgan, and a lot of conversations in foreign languages she could not decipher. There was also a great deal of sexual deviation.

  Luckily, the Blue woman went into a coma before she broke free of the Wheelers. Catherine had her captive secured and transported back to the mansion, where she planned to probe her mind for more information. That strategy was junked the moment the Blue woman regained consciousness. When she wasn’t baring her fangs and hissing and growling like a rabid animal, she was laughing maniacally at the top of her lungs, exposing her fangs. It was only then that Catherine realized what, exactly, she had succeeded in capturing.

  When Jacob Thorne dismissed the photographs she sent him as fakes, she decided to make a DVD. That’s also when she made the mistake of getting Wexler involved. Which brought her back, full circle, to the whimpering mass of flesh lying huddled in her bed.

  Catherine shuddered, surprised by the force of the memories that had rolled across her idle mind. She normally tried to forget the past and banish the phantoms that flickered at the corners of her eyes. The liquor usually helped, but sometimes the shadows refused to be ignored—like tonight.

  Zebulon sat on the edge of the bed, watching her with that horrible, lopsided smile skewed across his face. Her father puttered around the wet bar, impotently pawing at the bottles with fingers made of smoke. Her mother, a barbecued baby at her breast, mutely studied the array of cosmetics cluttering the vanity table. The rest of the Skaggs children were clustered about their mother, like chicks about a hen, staring dully at their surroundings.

  “Go away, damn you,” she slurred at her dead husband. “I’ve made you into a goddamn saint. Ain’t that enough to make you lie still in your grave?” She hurled the highball glass at Zebulon. It passed through his forehead and smashed against the wall.

  Wexler peered out from beneath the bedclothes, eyes white with fear. There was a knock on the door, followed by a concerned masculine voice.

  “Mrs. Wheele? It’s Gerald, ma’am. You all right in there?”

  The room was full of dead people and stank of gin, jism, drie
d blood and soot. Her head felt like it was full of nitroglycerine and Tabasco sauce. “Everything’s just fine, Gerald,” Catherine said as she placed her cupped hands against her temples and blinked the tears from her eyes. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “I’m not sure about this…”

  “You’re the one bitching about being left behind when I leave the loft,” Sonja said, scowling at him impatiently with her hands on her hips. “If you want to get out of here, you gotta leave the same way I do.”

  “Maybe if I tried it one more time ...”

  Sonja sighed and lifted her shoulders in a see-if-I-care-if-you-break-your- neck shrug. “Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Literally.”

  That was exactly what he was afraid he would do. Claude craned his neck back, counting the metal rung set into the wall that led to the trapdoor set in the ceiling. There were thirty. It was the third time he counted them, and there were still thirty of them. He’d hoped that a few would disappear at each recount, but the number refused to decrease. Normally he wouldn’t have been so insistent on climbing the ladder by himself, but the only other option was Sonja carrying him out, and while talking to her was one thing, the idea of making physical contact with her was as attractive as petting a tarantula.

  He grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder, which was cold to the touch and lightly coated with rust. He clutched the second rung with his other hand, using upper-body strength to pull himself along, as his right foot groped blindly for purchase on the lower rung he’d just cleared. So far, so good. His head felt like a balloon full of dirty water, and his heart was beating hard enough to shake his ribcage, but he could do it. Sure. No prob. All the way to the top. Yeah. He managed two more rungs, grunting and gasping as if he was steam-driven. It was like he was back in junior-high, trying to climb the rope in gym class.