The wakening, p.28
The Wakening, page 28
Her! The woman from his nightmares, the one who’d led him back to the world of the living. Even with her eyes closed and clothed in a hospital gown, he recognized her instantly. Her face was as pale as her sheets and glistening with sweat, and a dark bruise marred her forehead. Deep shadows rested in the hollows of her eyes. A machine next to the bed kept dinging an alarm and a set of lights flashed yellow. A gray-haired nurse tended to the IV attached to Claudia’s arm.
“Doc, what’s going on?” Randi asked.
“We don’t know.” Ronsen checked something on an electronic chart and handed it to the nurse. “We’ve ordered a CT scan, in case it’s a cerebral incident, but there’s someone in the machine right now so we’re just waiting until we can get her downstairs.”
Leo took a deep breath to regain his composure. Lockhart had said he’d shot a woman, one of a pair of identical twins possessed of psychic abilities. Was this her, or the sister? One of them had come to him, and he needed to understand why. There was much more going on in Hastings Mills than just a case of possession.
“Doctor, can you give us a few minutes alone with her?” Leo flashed his ID again.
“I can, but as soon as that gurney gets here, we’re moving her.”
“Understood.”
Leo waited until they left and then quickly took his cross and a bottle of holy water from his pockets. “Please, Ms. Zimmerman, Officer Rose, step back.”
They did. Stone moved as well, but Father Bonaventura motioned for him to stay next to the bed. “I’ll need you to hold her hand,” he said.
Frowning, Stone did as he was told.
Holding the cross aloft, Leo recited:
“Christ beneath us, Christ above us, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love us. Strengthen us in the power of Your might, O God. Dress us in Your armor so that we can stand firm against the schemes of the Devil. Protect us, Lord, from the forces of darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in all their forms. Be the shield that guards us.”
Leo splashed the blessed water on Claudia, the bed, and Stone, who gasped and tried to back away, but Claudia’s hand tightened around his, even as her moaning grew worse.
“You are our keeper, O Lord, and we your flock. Protect us from all evil and keep our souls from danger.” He splashed the holy water again, this time on everyone. Stone cried out and his body went rigid.
“Guard our going out and our coming in. From this time and forever. In Jesus’s name, amen.” A third spray. Stone’s back arched and his mouth opened.
A puff of black smoke burst from him and disintegrated in the air. His body went limp and he collapsed to the floor.
On the bed, Claudia’s writhing and moaning stopped. She opened her eyes.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” she whispered.
And began to cry.
“Any other time, I wouldn’t allow this.” Dr. Ronsen paused with his stylus over Claudia’s e-chart. “But we’ve got a shortage of beds. More emergency cases in six hours than we usually get in a week.”
“I’ll be fine,” Claudia said, but she kept her gaze averted. Stone understood completely. He still felt like he’d just come out of a coma himself.
That thing used me like it used Curt Rawlings.
The very idea of it made him want to puke. Or bathe in holy water. He remembered everything. Every snide comment, every selfish thought. For the rest of his life, he’d have to suffer the guilt of what he’d said. What he’d almost done.
What would have happened if he’d gone back to the house and left Claudia behind to die? He was afraid to ask the priest.
Worst of all, Claudia still didn’t trust him. He saw it in her eyes, the way she kept glancing at him and then looking away. Does she know what I tried to do to Randi? What had she seen when he held her hand?
Rosen tapped the stylus on the pad and nodded. “All right. Your papers will be waiting down at the desk and—”
Randi’s phone went off, playing the theme to Ghostbusters. Everyone turned.
“Sorry. Guess I should change the ringtone.” She went out into the hall. Stone tried to help Claudia off the bed but she shook her head, adding another ball of guilt to the pile inside him.
Randi opened the door.
“Ken’s downstairs. We’ve got problems.”
“She specifically said, bring the priest.”
Ken was waiting in the lobby with Curt Rawlings when Stone and the others got off the elevator. Officer Rose had gone outside to take a call from the station.
“The demon was referring to me,” Bonaventura said.
Ken shook his head.
“No, she had to mean Lockhart. Abby doesn’t even know you’re in town.”
“It knows.”
The argument had been going in circles for several minutes, with Bonaventura insisting the demon wanted him, not Lockhart.
“Enough.” Stone’s voice carried farther than he’d intended, causing several people to glance at them. He forced himself to speak softer. “There’s a simple solution. We get Lockhart and bring him too.”
“And how do we do that?” Randi asked.
“We have to convince Mordecai to let him go.”
“No, you don’t.”
Stone turned. Officer Rose had come back inside, wearing a stunned expression. Before he could speak, Claudia let out a small whimper. “Oh no.”
Her eyes changed from violet to cloudy white. “Chief Mordecai is dead.”
“How the hell does she know that?” Corday asked.
“Is it true?”
“Yeah. Someone pushed him off the river embankment. Witnesses…they said it was a little boy.”
“Not a boy,” Claudia whispered. “A beast with many heads.”
“Jesus, pray for his soul.” Bonaventura made the sign of the cross.
“What else do you see?” Stone asked her.
“All of us are needed. The priest. The fallen one. We must fight together. It’s waiting for us. Laughing. It has—” Claudia’s eyes returned to normal and she burst into tears. Randi went to her and pulled her into an embrace.
Stone turned to Corday. “Who’s in charge?”
“Right now, no one. Our deputy chief has been in California for a week because his mother passed away. I’m sure someone called him, but it’ll take a couple of days for him to get back. In the meantime, one of our two lieutenants will take over.”
“Can you get Lockhart out?”
Corday nodded.
“Okay. Meet us at Curt’s house.”
“No.” Bonaventura held up a hand. “Before any of us enter the dwelling, we need to be prepared spiritually and informationally. There’s a church a few miles from here. St. Mary’s.”
“I know it,” Corday said.
Stone looked around at the group. “Last chance if anyone wants to get the hell out of town. This isn’t what you signed up for.”
“It’s my daughter,” Curt said. “I’m not leaving.”
“I’m in to the freakin’ end.” Randi gripped hands with Claudia, who nodded.
Ken cleared his throat and Stone got a sinking feeling.
“Uh, I’m sorry. I can’t. Me and Del talked earlier. This is all getting out of hand. We almost died. I – we – can’t take that chance again. We’re leaving as soon as I get back to pick him up.”
Ken’s words hit Stone like a gut punch. Del and Ken had been with him since before he got his television show. They’d become almost family. Which was why no matter how much it hurt to lose them, he couldn’t get angry at their decision. Forcing a smile, he nodded.
“It’s okay. You guys take a cab to Buffalo. Get a hotel and wait there until you hear from me.”
Ken looked embarrassed and grateful.
“Thanks, man.”
Stone turned to the others.
“All right. We meet at St. Mary’s Church in an hour.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hastings Mills, NY, July 20th, one year ago
By the time Officer Rose arrived at St. Mary’s with Robert Lockhart, Father Bonaventura had already spoken to the parish priest. Stone couldn’t hear their conversation, but whatever the old man said, it had worked. They had the church to themselves for as long as they needed. Father Bonaventura had wasted no time, arranging the tools of his trade on the altar. Several bottles of holy water, a round censer from which pungent smoke trickled out, and a Bible.
“Please gather round,” he said, motioning for everyone to join him at the foot of the stairs in front of the altar. “I am going to bless each of you.”
“Uh, Father Bonaventura?” Randi held up her hand. “What if we’re not Catholic?”
“Please, call me Father Leo. Or Leo. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic or not,” Father Bonaventura said. “This is to cleanse you of any dark energies and help protect your soul when you’re in the presence of evil. Think of it as a temporary shield.”
“Temporary?” Stone asked. “That’s not encouraging.”
“The demon we’re facing is very powerful. Much more so than the last time he entered this world.” Father Bonaventura cast a frown at Lockhart but didn’t elaborate. Lockhart looked down but remained silent.
Unlike in the hospital, Stone felt nothing when Father Bonaventura sprinkled holy water on him or waved the incense his way. He thought he saw Lockhart twitch when the holy water hit him, but he couldn’t be sure. Father Bonaventura read several passages from the Bible that Stone didn’t listen to, his mind already anticipating what they’d find waiting for them at the house. They’d already checked in with Del, who’d been watching Abby via the monitors. So far, there’d been no unusual activity since Curt and Ken left; she’d simply been lying in bed with her eyes closed. Even the cryptic symbols on her skin had faded to a blushing pink instead of dark red.
“Don’t be fooled,” Father Bonaventura told them. “The demon knows what’s coming. You can be sure it’s preparing itself just as we are. That’s why we must protect ourselves. Please, kneel and bow your heads.”
Father Bonaventura splashed holy water on each of them.
“God, Father of Light, creator of all that is good, protect your children from all evil. Guide them down the path of righteousness even as the Devil calls from the dark. Give them the strength to do your will and ignore the temptations of Satan. Protect them, Lord, in the name of your Son, Jesus, and his mother, Mary. Amen.”
“Amen,” Ken murmured. Curt and Officer Rose repeated it.
After they finished, Randi stood up. “Now what?”
Father Bonaventura closed his Bible and held it against his chest.
“Now the war begins.”
Del Hall caught the motion from the corner of his eye. He’d been uploading the backup files to a second cloud-based storage account he’d created, just in case something happened to the first one. As much as he agreed with Ken that they had to put their own safety first, bugging out on Stone went against everything he believed in. In the military, you never abandoned a post or ditched on a team member. If it had been anyone except Ken, he’d have said fuck off. But there came a time when you had to put love before work, or even loyalty to friends.
He could handle getting hurt. But dying for a TV show, or, even worse, losing Ken…those weren’t options in his book.
He glanced at the monitor for Abby’s room and saw she’d sat up in bed. She stared right at the camera, and it was obvious she wasn’t herself. Something in her eyes shouted evil.
She waved and the screen turned off.
A second later, all the other monitors went black as well.
“Oh, shit.” Del pulled out his cell and was about to hit Stone’s number when he heard the sound of tires on gravel outside the van. He climbed out the back doors just as Curt’s truck and Randi’s rental car came to a stop in the driveway.
A loud electronic crackling sounded behind him. He turned just in time to see smoke rising from several of the monitors. A second later all the screens blew out with a loud pop!
The front door of the house slowly swung open.
In the administrative building at St. Alphonse, President Alan Duhaime looked up as something thumped against his window. He caught a flash of brown that disappeared just as quickly. Frowning, he glanced at his watch. Almost three. He’d been going over the preliminary audit findings for almost six hours, and he still hadn’t found a solution to his problems.
They were going to catch him.
He’d thought he’d covered the money trail perfectly. Shifting funds, just a little here and there. Grants, donations, income. Nothing too noticeable. Just a few hundred thousand, quietly adjusted in the books as ‘rebates’ to the construction company for their work on Fifth Dallas. In return, a nice deposit in his personal bank account and a lower bid on the job. A win-win for everyone. He’d done the same thing for other capital projects without a hitch.
Except this time he’d forgotten to destroy some original documents when he replaced them with the falsified ones. The auditors hadn’t missed the discrepancies.
Now the board of trustees had ordered a full-scale investigation. A detailed accounting of the school’s financials for the past seven years. And when they uncovered all his deals, he’d be toast.
I need to clear my head. He still had two weeks to figure something out. He’d talk to his contact at the construction firm. Maybe they’d have an idea. After all, they’d be implicated too.
Better yet, maybe I can put all the blame on them.
New plan. Home, a stiff drink, and then he’d call his lawyer. He grabbed his leather satchel and headed down the stairs. He was almost at the doors when someone screamed outside. He hurried through and came to a stop when he saw Professor Marilyn Winkler standing on the cement landing, her hands at her mouth and her eyes bulging.
Hundreds of brown and black shapes littered the wide lawn and the sidewalks.
Birds.
They lay spread-winged and crumpled. All sizes and shapes. Sparrows, crows, robins, finches, and more that he couldn’t identify. He even saw a large owl under one of the tall maples that lined the walkway in front of the building. A few of the birds twitched in the throes of death. Most of them didn’t move.
A dark shape hit the ground by his feet. He jumped and looked up as several lifeless creatures slid off the shale roof three stories up and tumbled to the ground.
“What happened?” Marilyn asked, her hands still over her mouth. “Is it poison?”
“No.” Duhaime stared at the birds. He couldn’t help but feel they represented an omen of his own future.
“What is it, then?” Marilyn’s voice carved through his skull like nails on a blackboard.
Shut up, you bitch. Just shut up. Shut—
“What is it? What could—”
“Shut up!” He swung around and smashed his fist into her nose. She toppled over and he followed her down, dropping to his knees next to her. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” With each word, he punched her again. Over and over, until she no longer moved and three of his fingers were broken.
He stared at her ruined face for several moments before standing up.
Briefcase in hand, he went to his car.
When he arrived home, he went to his study, poured a tall glass of whiskey, stripped off his clothes, and sat down in his recliner.
When his wife came to get him for dinner, she found him masturbating in front of a blank TV screen and laughing.
At the Lodge Hotel on State Street, Pete Telles put down his package of cookies and opened the sliding doors that led out to the tiny balcony. Two floors down, three children played in the shallow end of the pool while their parents lounged in chairs nearby.
“Petey, be careful,” his grandmother said from inside. “Don’t go near the edge. It’s not safe.”
“Okay.” Pete leaned against the railing and peered over, watching the two boys and their sister splashing and jumping. One of the boys dove down and swam under the rope marking the beginning of the deep side. He kept going, kicking down to the bottom.
“Mommy! Martin’s in the deep end!” shouted the girl. Her parents sat up.
“Martin?” The mother ran to the edge, her husband a step behind. From his viewpoint overhead, Pete watched as Martin’s legs stopped kicking and a mass of bubbles rose up. A moment later, Martin’s body followed them.
“Martin!” the mother screamed. The father jumped in and pulled the boy to the edge. When he lifted him out, water poured from his mouth. The mother shouted for help while the father pushed on the motionless boy’s chest.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled. Others joined in.
Smiling, Pete went back inside to finish his cookies.
Leo watched the door to the house open. A powerful wave of evil swept over him and sucked the strength from his legs. He stumbled and grabbed the car to keep from falling. His vision blurred and his skull throbbed in time to his heartbeat.
The beast is here!
There was no mistaking the sensation. Corruption lay heavy in the air like the stench of dead flesh in a meatpacking plant. The decades fell away and he was back in the jungle, the presence of the demon fouling the atmosphere with its unholy evil.
Only magnitudes stronger.
“Father Leo, are you all right?”
Leo shook off Lockhart’s hand. He needed to be strong. This was no time to show weakness; the demon would sense it right away.
“I’m fine. Is everyone prepared to enter?”
Before leaving the church, Leo had insisted they each carry a rosary. The priest at St. Mary’s had supplied them, all blessed. Even the police officer, Rose, had received one, despite having to leave for another emergency call. Now Leo lifted his and indicated they should do the same. Claudia’s hands shook as she placed hers around her neck. He still had his doubts about her condition but if Lockhart’s information about her was correct, her abilities could be helpful.
