The rain shower passed quickly. The air felt crisper and cooler than before. Doug, still restless, strolled along the paths of the estate, determined that there was some mystery here that he could not see, some important clue that might shed light on the reasons he and Annie had been so suddenly wrenched from their quiet lives and propelled headlong into the world of high power, brutal murder and abject uncertainty.

Toward the back quarter, well away from the house, he came across a neatly kept kennel with several guard dogs within. Doug assumed they were guard dogs, at least. In years past he’d heard rumors of De Roché’s penchant for dog fighting, but had never seen any evidence. He’d also heard rumors of De Roché’s desire to be president one day and wondered, how, with so many skeletons (real or rumored) in his closet, the old man could accomplish such a lofty feat.

From what Doug could tell, these dogs looked healthy and vital. Upon catching his scent, however, the dogs—all large Dobermans—began pacing menacingly behind the kennel fence, eyes trained on his every move, teeth glinting savagely, but despite their intimidating postures they remained eerily silent. A handler emerged from a small building near the kennel, held his hand up and stilled the dogs. It was a simple command that was obeyed immediately, but what puzzled Doug was why the dogs had made no noise.

The handler stared at Doug for a long moment before motioning him to step closer. He was tall and thin with stooped shoulders and a head of thick unkempt brown hair.

You’re De Roché’s son-in-law,” the man said, his blue, piercing eyes magnified behind the lenses of round-rimmed glasses.

Doug stepped closer. “I am. How do you know that?”

“Word gets around. I make it my business to know what’s happening on these grounds. Name’s Remy,” the man added, offering his hand. “Joe Remy. Please call me Joe.”

Doug took the offered hand. “Doug McArthur,” he said.

“You’re wondering why the dogs didn’t bark,” Remy said.

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Vocal chords have been cut. Dogs that bark are useless for protection. The best ones are always silent, otherwise they warn intruders. Silent dogs attack an intruder before he sees them coming. That way he doesn’t get the chance to run, or worse, kill the dogs.”

“The idea is for the dogs to kill the intruder,” Doug said.

“Precisely.”

Doug had a thought. “Listen, Joe, do the dogs roam the estate freely at night?”

“You bet they do.”

“What about last night?”

Remy’s piercing eyes held Doug’s. “You want to know about the . . . intruder?”

“So there was one?”

“Officially, no, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.”

Doug squinted at Remy.

Remy cleared his throat and pointed at the dog pen. “No human walked these grounds last night.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“Quite. The entire estate is surrounded by twenty foot stone walls topped with electric fence and razor wire. And there are wide angle cameras every dozen feet or so.”

“What about the ocean side? Aren’t all beaches public land?”

Remy smiled. “Technically yes, but there are breakwaters on either side of De Roché’s property. Boulders block the way to the south, and to the north there’s an intercoastal waterway guarded by lasers and infrared. A mouse couldn’t get past those detectors. Listen, even if someone did manage to get onto the grounds the dogs would have torn ‘em to shreds.”

“We’ll how do you think . . .”

“They got to Mrs. De Roché?” Remy’s piercing eyes behind the thick glass lenses drew down into rheumy little beads. “Can’t answer that.” He laughed a short nervous little laugh. “Maybe the intruder didn’t walk.”

Doug remained silent staring at Remy.

Remy darted a furtive look back toward the house. “I’m not supposed to be talking about this.”

Doug looked around him. “But you are.”

“You don’t know this place,” Remy whispered. “There are eyes and ears everywhere, places you’d least expect. All I can say is there’s been some strange shit happening around here for the past week or so.”

“What do you mean?”

“Weird stuff. Lights in the night sky, strange apparitions. The whole compound’s spooked. The dogs haven’t rested much and neither have I.”

“So . . .”

“So, if an intruder killed Mrs. De Roché . . .” Remy’s voice trailed off.

“You think it might have been an inside job?” Doug said.

Remy frowned. “I don’t know. Nothing makes sense.” He leaned in close to Doug and continued to whisper. “I’m a hired hand here, I do a job. I’m good with the dogs, it’s the only reason they keep me around. I ain’t supposed to think.” Remy’s eyes darted back and forth in suspicion.

“What are you trying to tell me, Joe?”

“You know how the Mrs. died?”

“Gunshot wound,” Doug said.

“No, no, no.” Remy gave a quick shake of his head. “That’s the official story, but I can assure you she didn’t die that way. A friend of mine, Don Savage, works for Theo, the old man’s security chief, told me her death was brutal, some sort of sick ritual, and it happened practically beneath the old man’s nose and he couldn’t do anything about it.”

—–

By the time Annie came to her senses the room had begun to darken with the coming of night. Weary, she’d lain on the bed with no intention of napping, but the day’s events had evidently gotten the better of her because before she knew it she was caught in the middle of a dream. In the dream Doug was falling from the sky, his arms and legs outstretched like those of a skydiver. Behind him and all around him other people fell, bent and broken people. And the sky, as far as she could see, was littered with debris. The dream fragmented before she could make sense of it, and she came awake with a jolt.

Clothes had been set out for her, she saw. She got up and inspected the garments: a plain but elegant midnight blue dress, shoes, stockings and underwear. All of it seemed new but decidedly retro. Not exactly what she would have chosen, but considering the emergency situation that had brought them here, the garments would have to do.

She wondered where Doug had gone. A small smile touched her lips thinking that he might have been the bearer of these gifts. It would be just like him to play a sexy little game with retro lingerie. Their sex life, thanks to Doug, had always been full of delightful surprises. The thought suddenly struck her as ridiculous. Earlier, when they’d parted Doug had been in no mood for games. Besides, where would he have come up with such things? No, the mostly likely bearer was Greta.

In her closet she discovered a man’s suit, obviously left there for Doug—it looked to be about his size—along with shoes, socks and underwear.

It was a little unsettling to think that while she’d slept someone had been in her room, moving about, watching her sleep. Again she thought of Greta and a cold shudder worked through her.

She padded across the hall to the bathroom, undressed and stood naked before the full-length mirror, searching for telltale signs of pregnancy. She turned to the side gliding her hand over the slight swell of her belly. Satisfied, she looked away and began scanning the room. She did not want to think about what her mind involuntarily kept going to.

Your mother got up to go to the bathroom and was shot in the heart by an intruder.

A sob escaped her with the realization that this was the room where her mother had drawn her final breath. Where exactly had she been standing? What had she been thinking? What had she been feeling when the final moment of her life had arrived? Had she seen her executioner? Did she recognize the person, know his or her name? These pursuits were useless, Annie knew. She’d go crazy if she continued down this path.

She suddenly realized just how inconceivable the explanation of her mother’s death seemed now that she’d had the chance to really think about it. Death could not have happened in this sterile place. Doug’s objections came to mind. How could a gunman get through security to begin with? Annie had been wondering the same thing, of course, although her mind still did not want to accept the implications of his objections. And if a gunman had gotten through security then why hadn’t her father been murdered instead of her mother? He, after all, was the guilty party, the hard-assed deal maker, the bastard businessman who never gave an inch and without remorse left his enemies to flounder in their losses. Mother was just an innocent bystander, wasn’t she? As far as Annie knew Rachael hadn’t an enemy in the world. No, there was something wrong here. She continued to scan the bathroom but found no evidence of her mother’s murder. Where were the crime scene investigators? Didn’t it take days for them to complete a murder investigation? Why wasn’t the bathroom cordoned off with crime scene tape?

Annie knew the answers to her own silent inquiries, of course. Daddy’s vast influence eclipsed that of police and politics. He had neatly and tidily taken care of everything before she and Doug had arrived. There would be no official investigation into her mother’s death. Justice would be dealt but it would come from the high echelons of the De Roché empire rather than sane and normal channels. The police would do what they were told and be grateful that De Roché did not bring his enormous wrath down upon them. Yes, if the police had even been called to the scene, the investigation into her mother’s death would have been perfunctory at best. Now all evidence of her was gone. It was as if Rachael Kincaid De Roché had never existed.

Annie stood at the window hugging the rag doll from her childhood to her bosom, watching Doug make his way up from the beach. She saw him stop in the garden among the life-size figures of David, the Thinker and so many others of her father’s fancy. For a moment Doug looked as if he belonged there with them, forever frozen in some weird and classical time warp.

The thought left her empty. As a child she had grown to hate those solemn, unyielding figures. And at night she would lie in bed and imagine them coming to life and roaming the house in search of a lonely little girl that wept for the arms of a mother who did not love her.

After Annie had gotten back from the beach she’d searched the house for occupants finding not a servant or a security person in sight. Strange, she thought, considering what happened just last night. Daddy seemed to be absent as well.

In the kitchen she found Greta, the flight attendant sitting at the table with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other. “Oh it’s you,” Annie said with little interest.

“Would you like some?” Greta said motioning toward the cup.

Annie shook her head in irritation. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “And where’s my father?”

“You’re father had business elsewhere,” Greta replied. “And I am here at his appeal.” Greta drew on the cigarette. “I wonder if you realize what sort of trouble you’ve caused him.”

Annie’s temper flared. “You have no right—”

“Maybe not. But I only have your father’s interests at heart.”

“He can take care of himself.”

Greta Glared at Annie. “You’ve been away far too long. You don’t realize…”

“What don’t I realize?”

“Things here have changed, and not for the better.”

“No shit. My mother was murdered.”

“A terrible tragedy, yes, but not what I was referring to.”

“What could be worse than that?”

“You have no idea.”

“He’s afraid, I can tell.”

Greta crushed her cigarette out in an ashtray. “His empire is crumbling around him,” she said. “There are holes in his defenses. Your mother’s murder is proof of that. He has enemies. Lots of them.”

“Who’s fault is that?”

“I don’t think you’re qualified to lay blame.”

“Who then?”

Greta glared. “Perhaps his own ambition.”

“Why is he throwing this insane dinner party tonight?”

“Who knows? It’s not my place to question his decisions. Perhaps out of some morbid need to push the envelope of his influence. Or maybe it’s an attempt to . . . confront the murderer.”

Annie was horrified. “You think he knows who it is?”

Greta shrugged. “I told you, he has enemies, some very close to his inner circle. You’re his only hope, you know.”

“Me? I don’t know how I can help him.”

“He needs you here.”

“He’s already made that clear. But I don’t see what I can do.”

“Just be here for him, that’s all.”

Annie glared at the woman. “And what business is it of yours anyway?”

“Your father and I have been  . . . close for quite some time.”

“Close?” Annie’s eyes drew down on the woman. “How do you mean?”

“I take care of things.”

“Things?” Annie took an angry step toward the woman. Suddenly she did not like Greta in the least. “What sort of things?”

Greta stood and faced Annie defiantly. “I’m your father’s personal assistant.”

“Since when?”

“For quite some time now, my dear, I can assure you. Don’t forget, you’ve been out of his life. You broke his heart.”

“He was a bastard.”

“He was only trying to protect you.”

“From what?”

Greta gave a short laugh. “If you don’t know by now you’re naïve.”

Annie stared at the woman, too tired to pursue demons. “I want to know what you do for him.”

Greta sighed as if this line of questioning bored her.

“Well?”

“Ordinary things, that’s all. I hire and fire the domestic help. I see that his clothes are taken to the cleaners, make sure his ties are straight and his shoes are shined. I assist him in many ways. I do the menial day to day tasks that he doesn’t have time for.”

“Speaking of, where is all the help?”

“Considering what happened last night, well, I told them not to come in today.”

“And security?”

“That’s Theo’s department. They’re here, I can assure you. You just don’t see them.”

Annie glanced around the kitchen, thinking she might see cameras. There were none visible, of course. Her father had always been discrete. “What about the dinner party?” she asked. “Who will do the cooking, and the serving?”

“He’s having it catered.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, security will be tight.”

“Where were they last night when my mother was murdered?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Yes, you’ve already said that. Please explain.”

“He’s very excited at the prospect of a grandchild,” Greta said, once again changing the subject. She took a quick glance at Annie’s belly and Annie thought she saw greed in the look.

Annie turned away from the woman’s scrutiny, feeling a fierce over-protectiveness for her unborn child. She felt suddenly very sick.

“Your father has asked me to look after you.”

“I don’t need a baby sitter.”

“You need to eat,”

“I’m not hungry.”

“At least let me fix you a sandwich,” the woman insisted, going to the refrigerator. “I know you haven’t eaten all day, and dinner won’t be until eight. You must think of the child.”

“Okay,” Annie said, willing to do almost anything to get away from this repulsive woman. Without washing the cigarette residue from her hands, Greta constructed some sort of sandwich from fixings in the refrigerator. She handed the plate to Annie.

“I’ll take it to my room,” Annie said, accepting the offering and turning to leave.

“Make sure you eat it all,” Greta said with a dark smile. “Think of the baby.”

Annie marched from the room without replying.

As she climbed the stairs to her room she had the unsettling feeling that she wasn’t alone. It was a familiar feeling that did not frighten her much. She’d spent half her youth here and she was used to the odd paradoxes of this place. In a way it seemed oddly alive, often menacing, as if the very fabric of it was constructed of lost souls.

In her room she locked the door behind her, grateful to be away from Greta. She sat the repulsive sandwich on her dressing table where it remained untouched.

Picking her rag doll out of its cradle she stood at the window rocking it gently in her arms, pretending it was the baby she carried inside her, Doug’s baby, the child they’d been dreaming about for so many years but had been afraid to make. Why had Doug been so afraid? And why had he never confided his fears in her? And the most vexing question of all: why had she never pressed him?

Something stirred behind her. She whirled, afraid that Greta had somehow gained access to her inner sanctum.

Her mother stood by the door.

“Mama?” Annie cried, dumfounded and frozen in place. “Oh my God. How did you . . .?”

The woman did not reply.

Before Annie could get herself under control tears had overwhelmed her. “What happened to me in this room, Mama?” she cried. “What did that awful . . . thing do to me? What did it want, and why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t Daddy help me? Why did I have to run away?”

Rachael De Roché did not answer her daughter’s urgent pleas; instead she opened her arms and offered her an embrace she had rarely offered in life. In death had she discovered the capacity to love as well as be loved? No, never. Annie understood that Mama wasn’t really here, she was in a morgue somewhere downtown waiting to be placed forever into the womb of the earth, and if those questions were ever going to be answered Annie knew that she would have to look inside herself.

Her heart nearly breaking, she forced herself to look away from the surreal image of her mother and back to the statue of her husband in the rain-shrouded garden.

Doug had been right. Her soul was lost. Long ago something she did not understand had taken it. Coming back here only reminded her of the truth of her condition, and that nothing had changed. That nothing ever would. Her pleasant life with Doug in the Maine countryside was an illusion. The real Annie, the soulless person beneath the shallow skin, would always belong here with the ghosts of a thousand terrible deeds and memories, and now, it seemed, a new ghost had taken up residence.

There was nothing left inside her that could be shared, everything that had once held promise was now gone, gouged out of her long ago as if by some terrible surgical instrument. She did not understand how a good man such as Douglas McArthur could be fooled for so long. She was so empty and he was so filled with goodness.

Annie dropped the rag doll and curled her hands into fists, placing them against her mouth in a compulsive attempt to stifle the helpless sobs that were escaping her. There would have to be an excavation, she knew. It was long overdue. But she was unsure as to whether she had the skills or the courage for such an undertaking. There was so much here that she did not understand, so much that she feared, enough to make her wonder if she had the courage to go on.

“Doug!” she cried, lifting a listless hand to the rain-smeared window, hoping that he would peer up at her and smile that big beautiful Douglas McArthur smile of his. Whenever Doug smiled things were always okay. He was her rock, her breath, her life. He did look up; he met her eyes directly, but he did not acknowledge her existence. Was she now just a shadow, a ghost, standing here amongst all the other ghosts of her past? Doug walked on and disappeared under the overhanging porch roof that jutted from the house just below Annie’s bedroom window.

Night was chasing the rain down, obscuring all things around Antoinette De Roché McArthur, and Doug seemed to be fading into that obscurity, just as each and every good thing had, falling back, farther and farther from the illusion of the life they’d come to know and love.

He stood on the beach alone, breathing raggedly after his run, hands on knees, feeling a terrible weight in his heart. The calm blue surface of the Gulf of Mexico spread out before him, a wilderness he wished he could get lost in. Tiny swells lapped earnestly at the shore. On the western horizon huge thunderheads bruised the sky. Doug bent down and picked up a smooth flat stone, angrily throwing it, skipping it along the surface of the calm sea.

Today had been a day of immeasurable turmoil. He never should have brought Annie back here. He should have stayed in Maine and taken a stand.

But what would that have accomplished? Only delayed the inevitable.

He knew now without doubt that De Roché had made some sort of twisted deal for Annie’s first child. What he hadn’t known, and what he was confused about, was his own connection to it all. The monster he’d seen in De Roché’s mind, the monster he’d seen in Annie’s childhood bedroom, was the same monster that had been haunting him since childhood, the same monster that had taken his childhood friends and killed his parents. Everything was connected in some terrible way and for the first time he began to question his own purpose in the scheme of things.

But how could Annie have known the same horrors he’d known? Unless . . . no, he could not even entertain that notion. But it was too late, of course, he had begun to suspect a connection quite some time ago and in recent years it had been eating at him like a cancer. But deep down Doug did not want to accept it. It would change everything.

Right now the important question was why De Roché wanted Annie’s child? What’s so important about Annie’s first born that men and monsters would do anything to possess it? The dark and sinister fluttering blossomed suddenly inside Doug’s brain, causing a moment of vertigo and paranoia. You already know the answer to that question, Doug. You just don’t want to face the truth. He closed his eyes putting his hands to his head. A miserable groan escaped him.

Doug could not stop thinking about what he’d seen in De Roché’s eyes. He knew what it was, of course, that black and shimmering thing that was sometimes a bird, sometimes a leathery bat-like thing, sometimes a creature that was not quite a man. But Doug understood that it wasn’t any of those things. Not really. Not when you came right down to it and nailed it dead center. Somehow it was a sick combination of all three; an abomination, with something dark and unearthly thrown in for good measure; a collector of children, a soul thief, the devil’s spawn, with a laser beam eye that could somehow look inside you all the way to your soul. Doug had seen him in tragedy after tragedy in the years since a kid named Tommy Ricker had punched his lights out and had unwittingly driven an inoperable bone shard into his frontal lobe. He’d had to live with the bone shard, the headaches, the nosebleeds and the visions of terrible death and disappearance ever since. And he’d had to live with that terrible thing inside him.

The Collector was real and alive. Doug believed this beyond a doubt. And although he appeared to Doug as a ghost, he was convinced that somewhere he existed in the real world as a substantial being, and years ago he had vowed that someday he would find him and destroy him.

Now he was almost certain that De Roché knew about this creature as well. He had seen him in the old man’s eyes. Was it possible that he was linked in some way to De Roché and Annie, and through them, to him? It was a correlation he’d never before entertained. He’d had no reason to. After meeting Annie the visions had stopped. And he’d been so very grateful; he hadn’t wanted to think that her presence in his life had had anything to do with it. Now he could not shake these ideas from his mind. If it was true, if his meeting Annie had been something other than serendipity it would change everything, of course. The thought caused a shiver of dread to work its way through his body.

He needed to think about De Roché right now, as distasteful as it was. He needed to understand the man, his motives, his obsessions. He thought he’d known how far De Roché would go. He’d been wrong. Today he’d glimpsed something he had not been aware of until now: he’d known De Roché was cold and calculating. Now he believed the man was evil, perhaps inherently so. But something was wrong here, something that went beyond Rachael’s murder. De Roché’s empire was crumbling. Doug’s intuition told him that De Roché was a man frayed around the edges, alone and desperate, a man calling in all his debts.

Even so, the question always came back to the same thing. Why did he want Annie’s unborn child so desperately? And what did that terrible creature have to do with it?

Doug was bothered by Annie’s reaction to what he’d said after seeing the fluttering in De Roché’s eyes. De Roché had been staring at him and he’d seen it, and then he’d plucked words out of the air like an outfielder catching a fly ball, words that had shamed and infuriated Annie. Or perhaps they had terrified her.

“You locked her away up there with that . . . thing, didn’t you, Edmund? Annie is on her bed in her room, weeping and rocking back and forth in spasms of fear and grief. She’s hugging her rag doll. She’s young, perhaps no more than nine years old. There is a terrible weight in her heart. She is so lonely, and so . . . empty. You’ve been there with her, haven’t you, trying to console her, trying to explain why it has to be the way it is? Now you’re gone, but in your place you’ve left her with that . . . thing, that . . . that soul thief. That’s what it is, a soul sucker. A godless creature that’s helping you to draw everything good from her. It’s part of some . . . bargain, isn’t it Edmund?”

The implications of what he’d seen had sickened him, had wanted to drive him to his knees. He knew so little about Annie’s life up until the time they’d met; only what she’d chosen to reveal to him, and yet, at that moment he’d seen what he’d seen and he’d caught those words, unsure if they had come from Annie or from De Roché, or from somewhere else entirely. Perhaps the house itself had been whispering them in his ear. Pictures of some hellish tumor at the root of Annie’s childhood came into his mind, so dark and dirty, so evil that it was almost too much for him to bear. Doug hugged his arms around himself, closed his eyes and tried to force the pictures away.

But they wouldn’t go.

What if there was some connection between himself, Annie and De Roché? Something he’d never seen before, or had refused to see in is blind love for Annie. Suppose the old man could put his finger on the wheel any time he so desired, suppose he could actually manipulate people and events through some supernatural means. He certainly had power over his own daughter, the extent of which had been totally lost on Doug until now. He knew Annie had stayed away from De Roché for her own reasons, reasons probably much different than his. Or had they been? Just how much did Annie actually know? How much had she chosen not to tell him? Doug had never pressed her. Why not? She was so fragile and he was so afraid she would break, or probably more to the point, he was afraid she might reveal something he did not want to know.

An earlier self would have rejected all these suppositions as nonsense. Back then he was much more innocent of the world and its strange and complex ways. But Doug had changed. Annie had changed him. In a thousand ways he was more complex than he’d been before he’d met her, and part of him yearned for a return to the innocence and clarity of those earlier times. Love had changed him, but love, he thought, was a mild term. What he felt for Annie was something more akin to obsession, and he knew that De Roché was obsessed as well. That’s why he had been so afraid to bring her back to this place. Annie was the kind of creature that brought out obsessions in men.

Experience, he knew, was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was going to win this battle—and he knew unequivocally that this was a game of win or lose, of life and death; maybe a game of honest-to-god good versus evil—he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

Doug sensed movement behind him and spun sharply, his heart accelerating wildly. But it was only Annie, walking briskly toward him, her head high and determined, the soft, smooth swell of her hips gently undulating with each step. She had something to tell him, something devastating and terrible. He could see it in her eyes, but even more, he could sense it floating around her like an aura. She was about to destroy all they had worked for with a few careless words. Suddenly he did not want to know what she had to say, he was scared shitless of knowing. He thought he might go crazy if he knew.

She melded gently into his arms and held him tightly, trembling.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Annie, I know—”

“No, you don’t—”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“Something snapped. I hit you. I don’t know why—”

“It doesn’t matter, babe,” he said. “It was me. I was an asshole. I should never have said the things I said.”

“No . . . no!” she said. “You saw . . .  you were telling the truth. That’s one of the reasons I love you so much. You always tell the truth.”

Annie was so wrong about him it was almost a joke. He’d never told her the truth about anything; his terrible visions of the Collector and the fluttering things in his psyche that were sometimes birds sometimes bats, but that he knew on some basic level were none of those things; they were more horrific somehow, and prophetic, like they were trying to tell him something about a future not yet reasoned. And the worst deception of all: he’d failed to inform her of her fathers’ desire to possess her first-born child. It was as if he was somehow guilty of collusion. No, he had never been honest about anything with the person he loved most in the world. If she knew the secrets he kept from her she would almost certainly hate him.

“I just get so fucking crazy when it comes to you,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

“I know,” she said. “I know you love me. And I love you. That’s why I have to tell you—”

“—No!” Doug said. “Not now. Whatever it is, I know it wasn’t your fault. You were a child. They did things to you. They used you.” He was so fucking afraid, he realized, more afraid than he’d ever been.

Annie stared at him in bewilderment, tear stains streaking her cheeks. “But . . . how can you know these things?”

“I just do, Annie, that’s all. Sometimes I see things. Bad things. I don’t know why. It just happens. I saw something in your father’s eyes. I saw you and him and . . .”

“Oh, God, Doug, please, yes, I need to tell you—”

“No, I don’t think I can take it!”

“I’m not a bad person.”

“I know you’re not. You’re my angel.”

She nodded earnestly, staring at him in fixed confusion, and Doug could see the swell of relief mixed into all the other emotions. As much as he needed to know the real truth, he was relieved that she hadn’t spoken it. He needed to know it but he did not need to know it at this very moment. He felt deep inside him that coming to grips with Annie’s true past might destroy her and if that happened it might destroy him as well. He held her close, gracing her throat with a lace of gentle kisses.

“Annie,” he said. “I love you so much.”

Her hand moved up his spine to cup the back of his head, her mouth seeking his.

They went down onto the sand and she rolled over to straddle his hips. She reached to fumble with the buckle of his belt. He was suddenly half hard beneath her and trapped. She reached up under his shirt and ran her palms across his chest. His body was solid without being heavy. Silk hair spread out from his sternum and ran down the central groove of his abdomen.

She sat up a little and slipped his jeans down his legs, then his shorts. His cock sprang out and stood straight up. She gently stroked the underside. It responded in surges.

“God,” she said. “I love that thing.”

She leaned forward and her mouth met his.

Gently he coaxed her over and they fell side by side on the sand. His fingers worked at the button on the top of her jeans. She made no attempt to assist, enjoying the look of concentration that he wore.

Now his hands were in her jeans. There was urgency in him and much as she loved to watch his intent she aided the undressing now, raising her hips from the sand and sliding the jeans down. The dark triangle of her sex beckoned. Her thighs and calves were well formed, hard but not muscular; above them her abdomen was flat, elastic, no sign yet of the child.

Doug got to his feet and held out a hand, pulling her up when she took it. Without pausing she slipped her t-shirt over her head, revealing breasts that were full, well proportioned and natural.

He led her to water’s edge, and together they allowed the Gulf of Mexico to gently take them.

Doug pulled her toward him, and as she turned away from him, he put his arms around her midriff hugging her to him, his erection pressing against the softness of her buttocks.

“Mmm,” she said. “I forgot what it was like here.”

He slipped into her from behind. Gently she bucked against him, meeting his thrusts, and they made love in the warm saline bath, locked together as one.

Later he carried her out of the water, her arms and legs locked around him, her face buried against the side of his neck kissing him there. Her lips were hot, and he felt himself stiffening once again. He laid her gently on the sand, stood above her for a long moment, marveling. His cock stood out before him, nine o’ clock.

“Doug,” she breathed as he moved gently down onto her. “Oh, God, there’s so much I need to tell you, so much you don’t know. So much I’m just beginning to understand myself.”

“Shhh,” he said, pressing himself down to meet her thrusts. “There’ll be time enough later.” His cock filled her and they made love for a second time.  “Can’t stop, babe,” Doug said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t. I want it.”

He tried to stave off his eruption for a few more trembling seconds, the heat of her channel, the swell of her breasts, the beauty of her soul, the confounding mystery of her, all of it and more, filling his senses.

She danced beneath him. “I love you,” she said. “I love you, love you, love . . .”

—–

They lay together for a long time, naked and silent on the deserted beach. Doug lay back, closing his eyes. Sometimes he could see Annie more clearly when he could not see her at all. When he thought of Annie—which was almost all of the time—he saw her as a flawless creature, a sculpture, painstakingly wrought from some magic block of marble by the hands of an immortal master. She was in his mind’s eye now, her skin pale and cool, her body supple and long, like a stretching cat; and her laughter, the ringing of delicate wind chimes; her eyes, the color of each season, changing to reflect her myriad moods. And her mystery, yes, there was so much mystery in her, deeper and more profound than he could ever hope to comprehend.

By contrast, he was just an ordinary man, raised by an aunt in a small and unpretentious house on a village street and sent to public schools. He could never be the god to Annie’s goddess, and lying there beside her naked on the beach he felt strangely like an imposter.

After a while he turned and faced his goddess. “How did you manage to get away from your father?” he asked.

“I told him I was going out to find the man I loved, that you were the most important person in the world to me.”

Doug stared at Annie. “You’d think he’d know that by now.”

“It’s important that he hear it from me.”

A startling yet tantalizing thought struck Doug. “Do you suppose he knows what we just did?”

Annie shrugged giving Doug a careless grin. “He’s got guards posted around the estate, and cameras. I imagine one of his boys has reported to him by now.”

An image of Theo the Greek God came to Doug’s mind, standing behind the row of beach pines with a set of binoculars, perhaps a video camera. “You think someone was watching us?”

Annie flipped her wet hair carelessly back. “Doug, nothing happens here that he doesn’t know about. I don’t care. Why? Do you?”

Doug wasn’t sure how to answer that question. It was too complicated. For obvious reasons part of him did, for reasons much more ambiguous there was a part of him that didn’t.

“Maybe it would convince him of our love for each other,” she said.

Doug sighed. “I don’t think love matters to him. I’m not sure he’s capable of it.”

“He’s stubborn and possessive. He’s used to getting his way.”

“Spoiled is more like it.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know what’s going on in his life now,” Annie replied. “I’ve been away too long.”

“He acts like he owns you.”

“He used to . . . in a way he still does . . . but only part of me.”

“Which part?”

“I’m his daughter. That will never change.”

“No, I don’t suppose it will, but you’ve done okay without him, right?” Doug was grasping at straws, his jealousy simmering just beneath the surface, threatening to boil over. He hated himself for his emotions.

“Tell me your parents don’t still own a part of you.”

It was an evasive answer, Doug knew. He turned away from Annie, staring out at the calm sea. The bruised sky had blocked out the setting sun and a huge shadow moved across the water toward them. He blinked his eyes and for a short moment he was in that long ago place, sitting in the back seat of the car, his mother and father in the front, so excited because they were going to the bank to sign papers for their first home. Then, the moment was shattered forever in a powerful explosion of glass and twisted metal and he realized he hadn’t been there at all. Some sort of terrible magic had caused him to see them die from across time and space.

Doug was hauled back to the present, still staring at the black and ominous mass in the distance. The cloud seemed to be made up of a million black and fluttering wings, all beating together in some senseless and hellish rhythm. He closed his eyes, opened them again and the illusion was gone. He couldn’t deny the truth in Annie’s words. Even in death he felt his parents in ways he couldn’t articulate but wouldn’t change for the world. He never wanted to let go of that.

“He’s alone now,” Annie said. “I’m all he has left.”

Doug turned back around. “He has his boys.”

Annie gave her head a rueful shake. “Something’s changed. I’ve never seen him this way. He’s frightened.”

“He should be. He’s made serious enemies. His wife was murdered before his eyes.”

“Are you saying he deserves what he gets?”

Doug frowned. “I don’t know what I’m saying. You know how he feels about me.”

“I think he’s afraid of death,” Annie said. “He used to think he was immortal. Now I don’t know. ”

“He wants me out of the way.”

“I know how to handle him. We made a bargain.”

Doug searched her face. “What bargain?”

“A little time, that’s all.”

“Wow, he’s gotten to you already, hasn’t he?”

Annie did not reply.

“You’re staying, aren’t you?”

She looked away. “Just until the baby’s born,” she said, her voice a mere whisper. “He needs me, Doug.”

Doug felt like he’d been stabbed in the heart. “Annie, he’s winning. Can’t you see?”

“What is he winning?”

“I don’t know. You! The baby! The game! Don’t let him do this.”

“There is no game.”

“There’s a game all right and you’re playing right into his hands. He has everything he could possibly want here. He’s got his money, his boys . . . his fucking power!”

“Don’t be this way, Doug.”

“You’re making me crazy, Annie.”

“I’ll always be your girl.”

Annie was looking Doug directly in the eye, and in a flash of shocking realization he saw that she knew about her father’s desire for her first born. Doug was as certain of this as he’d ever been about anything in his life. Annie had always known. Perhaps she wasn’t consciously aware of it, but hidden deep inside her DNA was the trigger that had brought her here to this moment in time, the obedient little girl, home to Daddy, giving him what he wants, what he demands. And Doug also knew in that moment that no matter how much he wanted it to not be so, there was nothing he could do about it. He stood up and slipped his jeans on. His face felt flushed and feverish, as though Annie had struck him again, as if he might go crazy any second and strike her. “So that’s what this was all about?”

“What?”

“This little seduction of yours.”

“It wasn’t about anything except my love for you.”

“Oh, balls, Annie. You came here to deliver the worst possible news and like a fool I wouldn’t let you.”

“You don’t trust me,” she said.

“I don’t trust him, for Christ’s sake! And you shouldn’t either. He’s manipulating you and you’re letting him. I don’t even know who you are. I’m not sure I’ve ever known.”

“Grow up, Doug.”

Doug searched her face again. “For God’s sake, Annie, you don’t trust him.”

“Maybe it’s time I started.”

Doug picked her clothes up off the sand and threw them at her. “Cover your tits,” he said. “I don’t want anyone but me looking at you.”

“Doug, don’t.”

“What’s happening to us, Annie?”

She didn’t answer him. Truthfully she didn’t know. She felt those black and fluttering things Doug had spoken of, all around her now, consuming her, and they were real, and furthermore she did not have the power to resist their ugly persuasions. She felt like something inside her was in the process of dying even as her unborn child began to live. She got dressed, stood on the sand waiting.

Doug had walked back down to the water and was standing there, skipping stones over the calm surface. He was her rock, her love, her Adonis. Muscles rippled in his arms and shoulders and buttocks. His beauty and his heart made her ache. “I’m so sorry, Doug.”

“No you’re not.”

“Daddy’s planning a dinner party tonight,” she said. “He wanted me to make sure you knew.”

“Dinner party?” Doug said amazed. “My God, his wife was just murdered.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Annie said. “But he expects us both to attend.”

“Can’t he wait until she’s in the ground?”

“He has his reasons.”

Doug did not reply. He just stood there skipping stones. Annie felt like she was dying, drowning in a sea of sorrow. “Are you coming?”

“No,” he said without turning to face her, “I have to think.”

Annie turned and walked back to the house alone.

—–

He walked along the deserted beach deep in thought. He couldn’t help but think the old man had won. But what had he won? Their child? What kind of game was he playing? What kind of game was Annie playing? Surely it was a game. Away from the old bastard, Annie was a different woman, strong, independent and focused on her art. Maybe Doug had somehow made a terrible error. Perhaps she’d never been anything but what she was now. Perhaps their entire life together had been a colossal lie. She had gone from being De Roché’s little girl to Douglas McArthur’s woman, and now it seemed she was reverting back to daddy. In the absence of his wife De Roché would make Annie his woman. Hadn’t he always felt down deep that someday he’d lose her in this way, that everything up till now had all been some crazy yet temporary dream?

For Christ’s sake, McArthur, grow up. You’re being a complete and total paranoid jerk. The girl just lost her mother. You know she loves you. You’re just being selfish. You don’t want to share.

It was late when he started back. The wind had picked up and the sky had darkened. As he approached the house, rain began to fall, a fine, soaking mist, more a wall of liquid fog than rain.

He reached the garden and stood very still in amongst the marble figures there, imagining he was one of them, and feeling like stone. His eyes searched the mansion. Behind a rain-streaked window on the second floor, a vague figure stood, distorted by rivulets of rainwater. It was a young woman—he could tell that much—perhaps a ghost of some long ago resident—and she held a child, rocking it gently in her arms. He squinted trying to make sense of what he was seeing, but it was no use, the distortion was too great. Shivering, Doug made his way out of the garden, finding shelter from the rain under the Corinthian-columned porch. There he stood staring into the garden as the deluge came, his unease a physical weight in his heart. Thunder clapped loudly overhead as lightning parted the heavens.

Annie and Doug were announced and they entered the study. De Roché sat with his back to them. He did not turn but simply addressed them from his vantage point in the plush leather chair. The only part of the man that was visible was the back of his head and the neatly-groomed shock of iron-gray hair that covered it.

“Good of you to come to your mother’s funeral,” were his first cutting words.

Ah yes, the games had already begun and Doug knew there would be no letup until the place was rank with carnage.

The effect was devastating, of course, as Doug knew it would be. De Roché was a master. He had shattered his daughter’s heart with that tactical first blow. Annie looked as if the wind had been punched from her body. This is how De Roché had become so powerful, Doug knew, by launching the first strike, attacking his enemies when their defenses were down, when they were most vulnerable. Over the years he had elevated this keen sense to nearly an art form. Annie had no strength for a fight. She was broken by the news of her mother’s murder. She only wanted to grieve.

“Daddy, I’m so sorry,” she said as if she herself had somehow been responsible for the tragedy. She went around to the front of her father’s chair, dropped down onto her knees and put her head in the old man’s lap, weeping.

The arrogant bastard sat stroking her head as if she were a pet.

Doug stood in the shadows feeling absurd, out of place, but mostly angry. He never had belonged here. The old man was right. Annie had never actually belonged to him. He could see that now. She had only been on loan to him, and now De Roché was calling in his debts. Annie would be snatched from his grasp in a heartbeat. Never had he felt closer to such an eventuality than at this very moment. The man had incredible power over people, and Doug knew that this was the reason Annie had run in the first place and had stayed away for so long. She feared his dominance, because she was powerless in the face of it. And she knew as did he, that De Roché’s power had somehow been strengthened by the death of her mother. His hold on Annie was greater now, and Doug knew something else, although he did not understand how he knew it. And it scared him more than anything ever had: the birth of Annie’s child would somehow give De Roché even more power, perhaps enough to . . .

“Douglas?”

“Yes, Edmund.”

“Come around so that I can look you in the eye when we speak.” He continued stroking his daughter’s hair.

Everyone was a servant to De Roché, jumping when he commanded, and this enraged Doug further. Nevertheless he did as he was told, going around to the front of the chair and facing the arrogant paragon. His hands balled suddenly and helplessly into tight fists, and he had to fight with himself to keep from slamming one of them into De Roché’s face. Watching Annie weep into the old man’s lap only added fuel to the fires of his rage. It was a tremendous effort just to keep his voice steady. “I’m sorry about Rachael,” he said. “I know how you must feel.”

De Roché looked up at Doug while stroking his daughter’s hair. “Do you now, Douglas?”

Doug nodded, trying with all his strength to keep his temper in check.

“Why have you kept my daughter from coming home?” De Roché asked.

Annie lifted her head and looked at her father. Her eyes were black wet pools. “He hasn’t, Daddy. It was my choice, not his.”

“Is that so?” the old man said, his piercing eyes dancing slightly with humor but never wavering, holding Doug’s attention with their hypnotic power. “Now you come . . . finally . . . when it is too late.”

“I’m so sorry, Daddy. I can’t undo what’s been done.”

“Things will be better now, child,” De Roché patronized. “I have you home again.”

Doug wanted to kill the bastard. If not for the way he was treating him, then for what he was doing to Annie. He was undoing everything Doug and Annie had worked so hard to gain. It had taken them years to build Annie’s confidence and self- esteem. And now, in an instant she had become Edmund De Roché’s obedient little girl again and he was punishing her for being bad, but worse, she was accepting his guilt, swallowing it like sustenance. He was playing her like a maestro, using her grief to manipulate her. The man was a monster. He didn’t give a shit about his dead wife or his daughter. He only cared about the game. Jesus Christ, he only cared about what Annie carried inside her.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say or do that’ll be of interest to you,” Doug said, trying to keep his voice steady. “You had this scenario all worked out long ago.”

“Careful, Douglas, if you know what’s good for you. Mustn’t forget about our little bargain.”

“You manipulative bastard!” Doug said moving toward the chair. “I made no bargains with you.”

“Doug, no!” Annie cried.

“Why not, Annie? He deserves it.”

Annie had pulled away from her father and was standing now, facing Doug, her eyes gleaming wetly, her face contorted into a nearly unrecognizable mask of grief. “Can’t you see he’s upset? He’s just lost his wife!”

“Stop defending him, Annie. He never gave a shit about his wife. Jesus Christ you knew that. We talked about it.”

De Roché sat in his chair drumming his fingers, that same cruel smile creasing the corners of his handsome mouth. Doug saw that the man was enjoying this game, pitting husband against wife. Long ago Doug had heard that one of De Roché’s favorite sports was pitting killer hybrid dogs against one another in arenas of blood and death. A cruel and illegal game, yes, but men like De Roché, who were above the law, never seemed to pay for their crimes. This little show here in the study was an arena of De Roché’s making, and he was reveling in its success. Doug took several ill-advised steps toward the old man’s chair, raised his arm and showed De Roché the back of his hand.

“Doug, no!” Annie cried again.

De Roché’s smile did not waver. Calmly, he said, “Leave him be, child. Allow him to prove once again that he’s the fool I’ve always taken him for.”

There was a long moment while Doug stood studying De Roché’s face. The eyes were filled with expression, and Doug thought he could see things in them, like dark and fluttering reflections in pools of stagnant water; there were remnants there of unspeakable things, a history of atrocities; things so repugnant that Doug wanted to shrink away in terror. Was De Roché purposely giving him this glimpse inside himself in hopes of frightening him off? De Roché had power over men, this was incontestable. Perhaps he had even mastered sleight-of-hand or studied the quirks of hypnosis. Suddenly Doug knew that it wasn’t a ploy, that his instincts were telling him something real. He was actually seeing things in De Roché’s eyes, and De Roché was taking a perverse kind of pleasure in showing him. Doug dropped his arm to his side and backed away, feeling slightly disoriented, now more uneasy than angry.

“Your husband’s quite the hothead,” De Roché said to his daughter, and Doug was unsure if the man was relieved or disappointed that Doug had backed down.

“Yes, Edmund ,” Doug said. “I guess you bring out the best in me.”

“Please,” Annie said. “Mama’s dead. Can’t we stop this for her sake?” She wiped tears from her cheek with the heel of her hand.

“Yes, of course, child,” De Roché patronized. “Now come back over here and comfort your father.”

A terrible jolting pain slammed suddenly into Doug’s frontal lobe, not unlike hot needles being driven into his brain. He knew what it was, of course: the eternal bone shard, the prophetic thorn in his brain, and he also knew what was to follow. The pain was so electrifying that he nearly collapsed. His knees began to buckle, but Doug would not allow them to do so. He would not give De Roché the satisfaction of seeing him in his moment of sudden and agonizing weakness. He concentrated on keeping his kneecaps locked in place. As the pain began to subside Doug felt the familiar and dreaded stirrings of inspiration. A picture was forming in his mind, one of a much younger Annie cowering on her bed weeping and terrified, surrounded by a veil of shimmering black evil. The realization of what was happening was nearly enough to unlock Doug’s kneecaps and drive him to the floor. “You locked her away up there with that . . . thing, didn’t you, Edmund?” Doug said before he could stop the expulsion of words.

“What are you talking about, Doug?” Annie cried. She was moving closer to her husband now, her head moving slowly from side, her eyes wild with a mixture of terror and fury and incredulity. “What thing?”

“Oh, you know, Annie. I don’t have to tell you. It still lives inside you like a cancer. I see it sometimes in the dead of night when you don’t think I see. Isn’t it time you stopped denying it?”

“No!” Annie continued shaking her head as tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Look at him,” Doug said to Annie, speaking of her father. “He knows that I know. Just look at that smug expression on his face.” Annie spun around to look at her father and then quickly turned back to Doug, her eyes large and round and gleaming wetly.

“Douglas . . .” Edmund  said sternly.

“No, Edmund,” Doug said. “You can’t make me not see what I’m seeing. No matter how much you want it to be so.” Another violent burst of agony slammed through Doug’s frontal lobe, accompanied by a light so brilliant and white-hot that he thought his brain had been flash fried. The light subsided quickly but the image inside the light remained, burning like a negative against the blackness of his retinal nerves. His eyes were now nearly closed and the lids fluttered as though he were in the midst of an REM sleep. “Annie is on her bed in her room, weeping, rocking back and forth in spasms of fear and grief,” he said. “She’s hugging her rag doll. She’s young, perhaps no more than eight or nine years old. There is a terrible weight in her heart. She is so lonely, and so . . . empty. You’ve been there with her, haven’t you, trying to console her, trying to explain why it has to be the way it is? Now you’re gone, but in your place you’ve left her with that . . . thing, that . . .” Doug had to think before he could adequately articulate what his vision was telling him. “. . . That soul thief. That’s what it is, a soul sucker. A Godless creature that’s helping you to draw everything good from her. It’s part of some . . . bargain, isn’t it Edmund?”

“Douglas, enough!”

“Rachael never knew,” Doug continued as though De Roché hadn’t spoken. “She never knew about the bargain you made with evil. She suspected but she never really knew what you were doing to her daughter. Isn’t that right, you sick son of a bitch? Everything I’m seeing is real. You allowed that evil thing to nearly empty your daughter of her soul, so that you could prepare her . . . for . . . for . . .” Doug stopped. Deep inside him he knew what he could not say. It was too horrible, too evil.

“He’s a psychopath,” De Roché said to his daughter, who had spun back around and was now staring accusingly down at him. “Can’t you see it? Listen to him. He’s babbling on like a lunatic about soul suckers or some such nonsense.”

“That’s why she’s the way she is,” Doug went on, ignoring the old man’s insults. “That’s why Annie needs constant love and reassurance. You’ve allowed that thing to steal her soul. She has no natural defenses left.”

Something burst inside Annie’s head, like hot light bulbs shattering. “Shut up!” she screamed, spun around and struck Doug full force across the face with an open hand. The sound was a searing whip-crack on horseflesh.

The blow wiped the revelations from Doug’s mind in an instant, but not before he recognized it as an old enemy, at once familiar and foul. Its shimmering residue lingered, of course, like bad blood, even as copious amounts of the red stuff flowed from his nose and onto his upper lip. His eyes filled with burning tears and his heart filled with sorrow, although he did not give father or daughter the pleasure of a flinch. He stood for a moment staring sadly at his wife before doing an about face and walking smartly from the room.

Annie needed to think. She should not have taken the drugs. But she’d been angry at Doug and she’d done it out of defiance. Now she was sorry. Her actions had reminded her of the other Annie, the Annie she’d left inside the walls of this soulless house more than a decade ago. That Annie was not the woman she was today; confident, self assured, happy. The other Annie was sullen and pensive and almost always afraid; a little girl who had hidden in her room and had welcomed the dreams because reality was so painful.

When she’d become old enough she’d left of her own volition. The shock had been almost too much for her father to bear. He’d never suspected that there were two Annies. The need for the drugs as well as the dreams had ended with their parting. So much had happened since that day. She’d found love beyond her wildest expectations, happiness with a good and kind man so unlike her father. Daddy had worshiped money and power, and what had it gotten him? His own self-imposed prison, a place to hide from the very things he’d once sought with such fervor. Doug needed none of those things. He knew exactly who he was. He had his morals, his confidence, his manhood, his soul.

Now her mother was gone. She’s the one who’d paid the ultimate price for Daddy’s sins. But was Mama totally guiltless? Annie guessed not. She’d played the part very well. Rachael had been a good actress, but Annie knew down deep that despite the pretences, she’d never had real happiness with her father. And now, she’d been mercilessly killed by one of her father’s enemies. How could Daddy have been so careless? The thought that wanted to intrude upon her unspoken question made her heart hurt so she pushed it aside.

Annie wondered why she’d been left alone until now. Surely her father’s enemies had known for years where she was. If they’d wanted her dead they’d certainly had ample opportunity to carry out such a wish. Had she been left alone because she posed no real threat to them? After all, she knew no names. She’d never cared enough for her father’s concerns to inquire. Faces she remembered, for all the harm that could do; most were just vague recollections as they came and went in an endless parade, bearing gifts and peddling deals, pandering shamelessly to Daddy, but hiding secret thoughts of jealousy and hatred for his power and his successes. She thought of the whispers she had managed to overhear from the sanctity of her haven, whispers grasped by childish ears as unwilling to listen as they were alert for forbidden information.

She felt an uneasy chill come over her at the dim recollection of those times. These were things she had never discussed with Doug, things even she had never been able to quite grasp herself, the details lost in the reticent silence of this old southern house and its mysterious aura. Now the house was awakening something inside her, reminding her of things best left alone.

Doug’s suspicions intruded once again, and she wanted to dismiss them out of hand. She wanted to get angry at him all over again for even suggesting . . . but she could do neither of those things. She knew her father. Doug was right about that. And she knew this house. This is the house she had been brought to on the day she was born, and it was as much a part of her life as the house on Beacon Hill overlooking Boston Harbor. But the house was not what mattered. After all, it was merely geography, wasn’t it? Wherever she had lived the restraints, and yes, the nightmares had always been the same. The outside world was something to be witnessed from a distance, to be protected against at all costs; as though the traffic that droned by beyond these hallowed grounds had been part of a world that didn’t exist. More, she understood now, a world that had been abjectly denied her.

It isn’t safe out there, darling. There are those who wish us harm simply because of who we are, because we are more fortunate than they are.

But Annie knew the real truth of the matter. It wasn’t her father’s good fortune that made people hate them. It was much more complicated than that. Ah, but now she was too tired to pursue demons. Perhaps later. Now it was time to see to her father, and get the details of her mother’s murder.

—–

Edmund De Roché sat alone in his private study tucked away in the east wing of his house. He had given strict orders not to be disturbed until his daughter and the man she had married arrived. The telephone beside his deep leather chair was on a private line, the number known only to a select few individuals. The study, though it boasted several lamps, was nearly in darkness. Only the small leaded glass lamp on the antique stand beside his chair burned, and that threw its light onto burnished mahogany rather than into the room. The curtains were all drawn. On the lamp table sat a half-filled bottle of single malt Scotch whiskey and an almost empty glass.

The only sound in the sanctuary was the soft, undulating stirrings of Strauss’s Operetta Indigo coming out of twin speakers on a bookshelf above the desk. Indigo was De Roché’s favorite operetta, but he loved the waltzes as well, especially Blue Danube and Rosen Aus Dem Suden. He always thought more clearly while under the influence of such timeless masterpieces. They did not make music like this today. They hadn’t in years, perhaps never would again. The stuff he heard occasionally at intersections that blasted from car speakers was a travesty; all low-end and no substance. Primal trash conjured by simple minds, as far removed from real music as paste was from unblemished diamonds. Perhaps when he was king of the world he would destroy all those who pursued such endeavors.

The thought caused a small smile to form on his handsome face, but his moment of self absorption was short-lived, for now it was imperative that he think clearly.

Rachael was gone, snatched from his grasp and slaughtered like an animal before his very eyes. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been expecting something. Since the announcement of his possible presidential candidacy, his friends, and his enemies, had all been frantically jockeying for position. Everyone wanted to be on board for the game of the century. The old axiom, ‘keep your friends close, your enemies closer,’ had never held greater meaning. The problem was, he could no longer tell one from the other. Had it been friend or foe that had struck at the very heart of his defenses, rendering his security forces and their accompanying technology mute? He could not be sure. No one had seen or heard anything until it was too late. It was as if a ghost had entered his grounds, his house, slaughtered his wife and vanished.

He’d been awakened in the night by what he believed was a scream. He turned on the bedside lamp, his heart pounding in his chest. The illumination sent a soft umbrella of light into the bedroom. Glancing toward the far side of the bed, he was shocked to see that his wife was absent. Frantic, he picked up the phone and called security. Assured that the perimeter was secure, and that nothing was out of the ordinary, he began to relax.

“Just a dream,” he said to himself, “just another of those damned dreams.” He’d been having far too many of them in recent months.

He got out of bed, put his robe and slippers on and went looking for his wife.

Out in the hallway, not more than a dozen steps from his bedroom door he found her hanging on a wire, suspended from a ceiling light-fixture, a massive steel fish-hook piercing her trunk. Her head was canted to the side and her tongue hung from her mouth. Her eyes were wide open and vacant with shock. Blood ran from her nose, her mouth and the wounds on either side of her body, dripping from her saturated nightgown and pooling on the fine Oriental carpet beneath her.

In a state of shock, the horror rising in him like a tide, De Roché backed away from the carnage that had once been his wife, stumbling against his bedroom door. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” he said in a small, moaning whimper. “That son of a bitch did this. That monster was here!”

Within minutes security guards were taking the dead woman down and a small army of them was searching the rooms and grounds of the estate.

His initial reaction after seeing the carnage was that the Collector had done this. However, after giving it some careful thought, he was no longer as convinced as he had been in that moment of horror and grief. De Roché’s enemies were many and varied. One did not live the kind of life he lived without making them. He supposed it could just as easily have been a traitor in his ranks, or a conspiracy of two or more who’d planned it to make him think it was the Collector. After all, the people closest to him knew of the demon’s existence and of what it was capable, although, as far as he knew, none had ever confronted it.

He’d looked at the cameras a dozen times since last night. They told him nothing. One moment Rachael was walking down the hallway toward the bathroom, the next she was hanging from the hook. The particularities that existed between those two events had been skillfully eliminated from the recordings. He and his security chief did not know how this was possible, for the technology was digital and there had been fail safes installed to prevent tampering. Further reason, he supposed, to suspect the Collector’s cruel cunning. The beast was a master of sleight, a magician of the highest order.

But even though he knew these things, he was still not entirely convinced the murder had been committed by the demon. The audacity of such an act was almost too blatant, even for him. It had been years since he’d seen or heard from the Collector, and although De Roché had wished a thousand times that he’d never struck the bargain and that the demon would vanish from the face of the earth, down deep he knew that it was far too late for that. The Collector was a monster, this was indisputable, but it was no fool. It was still out there, hiding in the place that it hid, waiting, and watching. And it would get what it wanted when the time was right. Or so it believed.

Beside him the telephone rang, interrupting his reverie. He stared at it in apprehension before picking it up.

“Yes?” he said, knowing instinctively who the caller was. “Yes,” he said three more times nodding his head each time as if to punctuate the word. He sat suddenly forward in his seat, a troubled expression on his face. “In New Hampshire?” he asked. “When? This morning? You say it’s on the television now? There were writings in Aramaic but they’re not being made public? Yes, I know what they mean. A symbol, you say? What sort of symbol?” De Roché listened for a long moment his face troubled. “Dear God,” he said finally. “He has renewed his search for the object. Now listen to me and hear me well; I do not want it falling into his hands. He took it from me once and he lost it. It must never again come into his possession! The object is mine! I am the one who found it and I am the one it was meant for. Do you understand me? Good. Yes, they are here and I am preparing to receive them. Now you do your part and I will do mine.”

De Roché hung up the phone, picked the remote control unit off the table beside him and pushed a button. The stereo went silent as a paneled wall beside the fireplace slid to the side revealing a wide screen television. De Roché snapped it on and tuned it to CNN. A chaotic mix of reports and video footage ensued, giving De Roché an overview of the situation in Exeter New Hampshire. There were many questions and few answers, of course. A news conference was scheduled for later and authorities were vowing to get to the bottom of the situation as quickly as possible.

After a few moments De Roché snapped the set off. A small bitter smile touched his lips. The Collector, he thought. The son of a bitch has resurfaced and he just left his calling card in New Hampshire. He wanted me to know. He wants me to be afraid. De Roché’s mouth felt dry and his tongue tasted like acid. He picked his glass up and took a sip, licking his lips, trying to moisten them. He sat thinking for another moment, his mind reeling.

It was time to deal with his daughter’s husband. Now that Annie was pregnant and safely in his care, McArthur would no longer be needed. If allowed to live he could pose a serious threat to the future. But above all else McArthur’s death would be of great satisfaction to De Roché. He hated McArthur to the core of his being. He always had.

Edmund De Roché knew things about McArthur. Perhaps things even McArthur himself had forgotten in his passion to be normal. The man possessed some sort of gift that made him much more complex than ordinary men. He saw things. He sensed things. He had the ability to see inside of people. He had the ability to see the future and perhaps change it. It was the very reason he had been chosen to be the father of Annie’s child. If the choice had been De Roché’s, McArthur would never have been a part of Annie’s life. As far as he was concerned McArthur’s gifts were dangerous. His life as a simple man, a carpenter, it was all bunk! De Roché was no fool. The man was an enigma. What bothered him most, however, was that he could not see deeply enough inside of McArthur to know if McArthur was aware of Edmund’s deceits.

McArthur had been brought to De Roché’s attention many years ago, and he’d followed his many childhood escapades with great interest, as had others. In the end he had reluctantly given his daughter up to the man in exchange for the greater good. Now Annie was back in the fold, pregnant with the child that would alter the course of human history, and McArthur would not live long enough to be of any trouble to anyone else ever again.

De Roché was not a man who believed in divine intervention, but he supposed that Rachael’s death had been the necessary catalyst to set the final act of this drama into motion. By serendipity or design it did not matter. The deed was done, and it was time to move on. Of course Annie could never know the real truth of her mother’s death. As far as Annie was concerned Rachael had been shot by an intruder. Period!

Rachael would be laid to rest here in Palm Harbor. Of the two homes this had been her favorite and it was fitting that she should remain here. The funeral would be tomorrow. De Roché was not a man who let grass grow under his feet. Nor was he a man who wasted time on grief. It was a non-productive emotion that would have no place in the new world order. So tonight there would be a celebration of Rachael’s life. Guests had been invited and the wine cellar would be opened. There would be a feast, the likes of, De Roché Manor had not seen in years.

The old man picked up the glass of scotch, lifted it to his eyes and swirled it in his hand. The amber liquid whirled around the bottom of the glass causing a tiny cyclone to form. At the center of the cyclone, darkness was born, spiraling out and away, licking at the vessel’s walls, growing, until it had transformed itself into a black and fluttering mass, like a hapless bird trapped in some cosmic attic.

“You want out of your cocoon, don’t you, you bastard?” Edmund whispered. “And there’s only one thing that can release you. There’s only one thing that can give you the ultimate power. Well, not as long as I’m alive. When the object is discovered, and it will soon be, I will be its master. And its power will be used at my discretion. If you want war, war is what you’ll get. I will defeat you and your ambition. You had the last word, but you will not have the final word. You will pay for what you or your henchmen did in my home on this terrible day. The child and the artifact will both be mine and I will use them as only I see fit.”

A single crimson point of light cut suddenly through the dark and swirling mass inside the glass, startling the old man with its livid intensity. His heart sped up suddenly, beating in a series of rapid and painful lurches, and for a moment he thought it might actually burst out through his chest.

Then a voice from some long forgotten past found his ear:

“I’m watching you, soldier,” said the voice. “I’ve been watching you since the day you found the artifact in that muddy ditch and made the bargain with me. I haven’t forgotten. If you think I have then you are sorely mistaken. I never forget a bargain or those who owe me. And I never forgive those who try to betray me. I always collect on my bargains.”

Edmund closed his mind against the assault, knowing that at least for now, he had the power to do so. He was uneasy, however. His silent enemy, his Lost, Forgotten and Forsaken enemy had surfaced suddenly and done damage, and this could only mean one thing; it was gaining in power. The object was closer at hand than it had been in centuries. His heartbeat finally stabilizing, Edmund put the glass to his lips with a trembling hand, upended it and downed the fluttering darkness that spiraled within.

Enjoy,

Mark

Chapter 10

August 12, 1996. Regressive Therapy

“To the best of my knowledge the visions began when I was nine years old,” Doug said, “and I always associated them with that punch Tommy Ricker gave me in the nose. I could be wrong about that but I don’t think so because there is not a conscious memory of anything even remotely similar to those experiences before that day. From then on it seemed that I was in possession of some terrible power of sight, something that would haunt my life for years to come. I tried to dismiss it, I tried to deny it, but every time I became complacent something would happen that reminded me of who I was and of the terrible things I was capable of seeing. Yes, it all began the day Tommy Ricker broke my nose.”

“That’s a very good beginning, Doug,” Dr. Pasternak said in a soothing voice. “Just lay back and relax. I’m going to take you back to that first incident. I want you to tell me in your own words what happened on that day. I want it to be as if you’re there and you’re living it all over again. Think you can do that for me?”

Doug swallowed nervously. “Sure,” he said, “but I’ve already told this story a thousand times. I told the other doctors and the police . . .” Doug’s friend, Portland Police Lieutenant, Richard Jennings was in the room and Doug gave him a helpless stare. “You know the story better than I do.”

“Yes, Doug, you’re right,” said Jennings. “I do know it very well. But considering what has happened, you know, the family you saw die last week, and the child that disappeared, well, I think it’s time we seriously tried to get to the bottom of this issue. Don’t you?”

“She hasn’t disappeared,” Doug insisted. “She keeps telling me she’s in this place called the House of Bones, the same as Tommy and Savannah.”

“I know, Doug, but you don’t know where this place, this . . . House of Bones is, do you?”

Doug shook his head.

“What Dr. Pasternak and I are hoping to do is open a new doorway, bring something through that perhaps you’ve forgotten, some key that might shed a little more light on what actually happens to you during these incidents. If we can do that then maybe we can figure out what’s causing it to happen, and just maybe, if those kids are still alive, we can find them.”

“You guys think I did it, don’t you?” the young man said. “You think that if you can get me under hypnosis I’ll confess and then you can solve the damned case.”

“That’s not true, and you know it,” said Jennings. He was sitting across from the couch on which Doug was reclining. “How long have I known you, Doug?”

“About ten years.”

“That’s right. Since you were eight years old, since the time of that first incident. And I’ve never believed that an eight year old boy could do the things that happened to those people. Nobody believes that. What Dr. Pasternak and I are trying to do, is exactly what he said we were trying to do. Deep hypnosis can sometimes dig beneath the conscious mind to areas of the brain that might store forgotten or forbidden information. Now, I think it’s worth a try if it can save those kids. Don’t you?”

Doug’s eyes moved from Jennings to Pasternak and then back to Jennings again. Finally he nodded, staring at Lieutenant Jennings as only one who truly trusts another human being can do. “Okay,” he said, “but I think it’s too late. Tommy and Savannah’s voices faded long ago, and the one last week, well, she’s already beginning to fade.”

“Don’t you think it’s worth a try anyway, Doug?”

“I guess so,” Doug said. “If you think it will help.”

“All right then,” Dr. Pasternak said. “Any time you’re ready?”

The eighteen year-old licked his lips and said, “I’m ready. You can start any time.”

“Now, Doug, I’m going to count slowly backwards from ten, and as I do so, you’ll begin to get sleepy. By the time I get to number three your eyelids will be too heavy to keep open. By the time I get to number one they’ll be closed and you’ll be sleeping soundly and peacefully. Okay, here we go. 10, 9, 8, 7, you’re getting sleepy, 6, 5, 4 . . . your eyelids are getting heavier, 3 . . .”

Doug’s eyelids fluttered then closed and his breathing became steady and rhythmic.

“. . . 2, 1 . . . Now, Doug,” Dr. Pasternak said. “What are we going to talk about?

“The day Tommy Ricker broke my nose.”

“Very good. Try to remember everything, all right? Every little detail.”

“Okay.”

“What are you doing at this very moment?”

“I’m playing with Tommy and Savannah in the front yard of their apartment house. It’s directly across the street from the house where I live with my parents. We moved there when I was two. Tommy and Savannah have been my friends for as long as I can remember. Tommy is nine and Savannah is seven.”

“Are their parents home today?”

“No, they had to work. But Janet’s upstairs.”

“Who is Janet?”

“The babysitter. She’s sixteen.”

“Do you like Janet?”

“Yeah, I guess so. She swears a lot and spends most of her time eating and watching TV. And she smokes. Sometimes her boyfriend comes over.”

“Is her boyfriend here on this morning?”

“Yes. I saw his car come up the driveway. It’s a red Camaro, a really cool car, and loud. When Janet’s boyfriend got out of the car he made a mean face at us kids before going inside. He was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and sun glasses.”

“What’s happening now, Doug?”

“Me and Tommy Ricker are having a fake Kung Fu fight.”

“A fake Kung Fu fight?”

“That’s right, fake Kung Fu fights are one of our favorite things to do. We pretend to be guys like Chuck Norris and David Carradine. But our favorite is Bruce Lee. He’s the coolest one of all. I know he died a long time ago, but he’s still the best, and today I got to be him.”

“How did that happen?”

“Me and Tommy drew straws and I drew the longest one.”

“I see. How do these fake Kung Fu fights work, Doug?”

“We fight each other without actually hitting the other kid.”

“Oh? Can you explain?”

“It takes a lot of skill.”

“Yes, I’m sure it does. Please explain.”

“One of us swings around with a punch and comes real close to the other guy’s face. Then the other boy throws his head back, or to the side and pretends he’s been hit. The punch is usually accompanied by a noise the puncher makes with his mouth which sort of sounds like a fist hitting flesh. We twist and spin and kick out with our feet, again coming as close as we dare to the other guy’s face. These fights can last as long as ten or fifteen minutes. Usually we end our stunt fight by wrestling each other to the ground and laughing.”

“All in good fun, then, huh?”

“It’s the most fun thing we do.”

“But on this day something goes wrong, doesn’t it, Doug?”

“Yeah, I get distracted by something just as Tommy comes around with this monster punch.”

“What distracted you, Doug? Do you remember?”

On the couch Doug’s eyes were closed and his head gave a quick shake. “No. Maybe I saw something out of the corner of my eye, or maybe Savannah said something. I don’t know. She usually stands on the sidelines refereeing. Or it could have been something else. I don’t really remember. What I do remember is how much it hurt when Tommy Ricker’s fist hit my nose. At the instant of contact it’s like this universe of stars explodes inside my head. The next thing I know I’m on my back in the driveway with Tommy and Savannah standing over me, their scared faces blurring in and out of focus.

“‘Hey, Doug,’ Tommy Ricker says, grabbing my arm and shaking me. ‘You okay?’

“When I try to sit up a huge lightening bolt of energy flashes across my vision, accompanied by a slash of pain so brutal, I might have died in that instant. My body convulses then stiffens, and I cannot move as a picture begins forming in my mind.”

“What do you see, Doug?”

“The Ricker’s second floor apartment. I know the place, and there is no question about what I’m seeing. I’m standing in the doorway on the threshold between the living room and kitchen. I can see the kitchen’s sideboard with the sink faucet protruding above it. The faucet is dripping, each drop forming on the rim like a tiny diamond before breaking free and dropping into the sink. I can distinctly hear the drops as they fall slowly into the dishpan: drip . . . drip . . . drip. The sound seems amplified somehow, so much so that it makes my head hurt.

“On the couch in the living room I see the baby sitter with her boyfriend beside her. They’re making out. The television set is on and I can hear Bob Barker’s voice, and he’s saying, “‘Tell them about the prizes, Johnny.’

“But the baby sitter and her boyfriend are not the only ones in the apartment. There is someone or . . . something else there.”

Doug stiffened and tried to sit up.

“Just relax, Doug,” Dr. Pasternak said, placing his hand on Doug’s chest and gently easing him back down onto the couch. “Whatever it is can’t hurt you. Remember, you are under hypnosis and merely recalling those events. You’re not really there, even though it seems like you are. Okay? Are you ready to go on?”

Doug nodded his head as tears squeezed out between his closed eyelids and ran down the sides of his face.

“All right then, what do you think you see in the Ricker apartment besides Janet and her boyfriend?”

“Some sort of swelling. I don’t know. I don’t actually see it at first, but I can feel it.”

“A swelling, Doug? What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure. It’s like a bubble or something. That’s all I can think of, and it’s trying to suffocate me.”

“Suffocate you?”

“Yeah, it feels like that. Like it wants to suffocate me.”

“All right then, go on, Doug. Tell me what’s happening now.”

“Well, in the far corner of the living room, behind Janet and her boyfriend, I think I see it, and it’s not a bubble at all, but more like a person, and it’s dressed in some sort of dark robe or something. At first it doesn’t move and I think it’s a statue of some kind, or a mannequin, you know, like those things in the department stores they hang clothes on. But in the next instant it seems to move forward a few feet, but I don’t actually see it moving. It’s some sort of . . . shift or . . . streak that looks like stretching metal. All silvery or something. I know it sounds stupid but that’s what it looks like to me. One minute it’s over here, and zip, just like that, it’s over there. It makes my head ache to see it. Like my mind can’t quite figure it all out. It’s like some sort of painful magic. I don’t know. I’m concentrating; trying to see it better, trying to bring it into focus. But it’s useless. Doing that only makes my head ache worse, and I feel like I’m gonna puke. I just can’t figure it out. I suppose I’m a little bit grateful for that. Something about its swelling presence terrifies me.”

“I see,” said Dr. Pasternak. “What’s happening now?”

“Janet’s boyfriend—his name is Lance—has his hand inside Janet’s blouse; he’s trying to get it off her. I can see that her resistance is only mildly serious. It’s sort of like they’re playing.

“‘Please, Lance, stop it,’ Janet says, taking his hand out of her blouse.

“Lance gets this wounded look on his face. ‘Aw, come on, Janet,’ he whines. ‘You know you want to.’ He puts his hand back on her breast and begins to knead it, you know, like it’s a ball of dough or something. He looks really stupid doing that.

“‘Get your hands off me!’ she says, firmly this time, throwing his hand away from her.

“But Lance is having none of that; he suddenly turns mean, draws his hand back and slaps Janet across the face. ‘You teasing little bitch!’ he says. His face is all twisted up with rage and he grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her like a rag doll. ‘You want it and you know it.’

“‘No I don’t,’ Janet whines, struggling to break free of his grasp. ‘I don’t want nothin’ from you, you asshole.’

“‘Yeah, well you’re gonna get something’, Lance says. ‘I didn’t drive all the way over here to play tiddlywinks.’ He grabs a fistful of Janet’s blouse and pulls hard, tearing it, exposing one of her breasts.

“In my peripheral vision I see the shifting figure move closer to the pair, only this time it seems to be fluttering as well as streaking, like my eyes are opening and closing real fast. You know, like that REM sleep we learned about in school. I’m so scared I just want to shrink away in terror.

“Janet begins shrieking hysterically, slapping at Lance’s face with both hands. ‘You fucking bastard,’ she screams. ‘Let . . . me . . . go!’

“But Lance doesn’t let go, and Janet’s blouse tears almost completely off her as she bolts from the couch. She manages just one step before Lance catches her foot, tripping her. She goes sprawling and he is on top of her in an instant. She is struggling and shrieking wildly. He rolls her over and tries to unzip her jeans. She lashes out and digs her nails across his cheek.

“He lets out a bellow of rage, puts his hand to the wounds, pulls it back and gawks in amazement at the jagged lines of blood that are tattooed on it. Janet wriggles out from under him, giving him a swift kick in the balls as she goes screaming for the stairs.

“‘You fucking little cunt,’ he cries with a mixture of pain and amazement. He struggles to his feet, hanging onto his crotch and goes after her. And then . . . and then . . .”

Doug stopped; his mouth was working but no more words were coming out.

“And then what?” Dr. Pasternak said, leaning forward in anticipation.

“Something bad happens.”

“What happens, Doug? What’s happening at this very moment?”

Lieutenant Jennings also slid forward to the edge of his seat, and the look on his face was one of intense anticipation. Doug’s head was rolling back and forth on the pillow and small beads of sweat had broken out on his brow. Beneath his closed lids his eyeballs were rolling frenetically.

“Would you rather not continue, Doug?” Dr. Pasternak asked with concern and Jennings heard the disappointment in his voice.

“No,” Doug said. “I can see it.”

“What do you see?”

Doug licked his lips and took in a huge draught of air, letting it out with a trembling sigh. “Yes, I see  . . . Janet stops suddenly at the top of the stairs, and she is turning around slowly as if she senses the presence in the room. Lance has stopped too and I can see his eyes darting back and forth looking for something that isn’t there. Then it seems like neither of them can move at all, like they’re frozen in place. Janet suddenly looks terrified.

“And the thing in the black robe is moving in closer to Janet.

“In the next instant the man in the black robe is standing directly in front of her—”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Doug,” said Dr. Pasternak, eliciting a pained look from the police lieutenant, “but until now you haven’t referred to the figure as a man. What makes you think now that there’s a man inside the robe?”

“I’m not sure,” Doug said, his head rolling from side to side on the pillow. “It’s in the form of a man. That I know. The robe has a hood or a cowl or whatever the hell you call it; and it’s pulled up over the head hiding the face. But the robe is long and I can’t see any feet, and I can’t actually see a face . . . but . . . wait. Wait a minute!” Doug’s eyelids flutter as his eyes continue to swirl behind them. The doctor sees that he has become even more agitated.

“What do you see, Doug?”

“Oh, God,” Doug suddenly said. “From somewhere deep inside the cowl I think I see an . . . eye.”

“An eye?”

“Yes.”

“Just one eye?”

“Just one, and it’s red. So red it’s almost making me sick. That’s why I can see it. It’s glowing like a hot cinder and it’s trying to burn through my eyes and into my brain. My head! Oh, Jesus Christ, my head is going to split wide open.”

Doug was trembling and moaning and tears were squeezing out between his closed lashes.

“It’s freaking me out so bad.”

“Why is it freaking you out, Doug?”

“Because . . . because, it’s looking at me, like it knows I’m here and that I’m watching. It’s from the unseen world and I’m not supposed to see it. No one’s supposed to see it. But I do, and it knows.”

Dr. Pasternak licked his lips. “The unseen world, Doug?”

“Oh yes. And he’s not the only one there. There are more of them. But this one’s different, this one’s special. He can do stuff the others can’t. But they can do stuff he can’t do too.”

“What stuff?” asked the doctor.

“Human stuff.”

“How do you know all this, Doug?”

“Because he’s whispering to me. He’s telling me. Nobody else can see it. Nobody else can hear it or know it. Only me. Jesus, only me.”

Pasternak was now breathing in anxious gasps. “What’s happening, Doug?” he asked. “What’s happening at this very moment?”

“The man, the creature, or whatever the fuck it is, has moved around in front of Janet, and he’s looking directly into her face. He’s no longer looking at me, but he knows I’m here. I swear to God he does. He’s turned away from me and all I can see is the robe, only now it doesn’t really look like a robe at all, instead it looks like flesh of some kind, like the skin on the wings of a bat, you know, all textured and creepy. And now he’s whispering to Janet.”

“Can you hear what it’s saying, Doug?”

“It wants to know where the children are.”

“The children? I thought it could see you?”

“It sees me from inside my head. But it doesn’t see Tommy and Savannah. And that’s who it wants.”

“Why does it want Tommy and Savannah, Doug?”

“I don’t know. Dear God, I don’t know!”

“What’s happening now, Doug?”

“Janet’s screaming. She says that the children are outside. She’s twisting and writhing like she’s trying to get away, but it’s as if something invisible has her legs bound together and her arms tied to her sides. She can’t move, she can’t kick, she can only scream. Whatever that thing is, it’s now moving closer to her face. Oh, God! Oh fuck! I think she can see what’s inside the darkness of the cowl, and it must be horrible, because she can’t stop screaming in terror, and she’s screaming so loud that her mouth is standing wide open like her jaws have become unhinged. And now I see a wet stain starting to form on the crotch of Janet’s jeans. The wetness is spreading out and running down the insides of her legs. Oh, fucking Christ, she’s so scared she’s peeing in her pants.” Doug stopped talking suddenly but his mouth was still working.

Dr. Pasternak glanced over at Jennings and Jennings saw that the doctor’s face had gone pasty white. He was sweating profusely, rivulets of clear liquid running down his forehead and into his eyes.

And from his sleeping position on the couch, Doug was now writhing and twisting and sweating, his eyes rolling like greased ball bearings behind closed lids.

And although Rick Jennings knew the story, had heard it on countless occasions, he’d never heard it in this much graphic detail. He sat forward in anticipation sensing that this might be the closest he would ever come to knowing the full story of what Doug had seen on that infamous day.

“Now something is coming out of Janet’s mouth,” Doug said.

“What is it, Doug?” Pasternak asked. “What do you see?”

“I don’t know, but it looks like water, or steam or something. It’s sort of silvery colored and blurry and it’s shooting out fast, like a fire hose, and it’s spraying directly into the front of the cowl and disappearing, like something inside the cowl is swallowing the stuff in Janet’s stomach. No! . . . I think it’s different than that. I think it’s ingesting Janet. I hear the noise as the stuff is coming out of her and spraying into the dark thing. Her mouth is hinged open and she is making a terrible gurgling noise that sounds like someone trying to scream underwater. Then suddenly it stops and Janet is no longer Janet.”

“What do you mean by that, Doug?”

“The dark thing . . . stole something from her.”

Jennings and Pasternak exchanged uneasy glances. “You mean the fluid that came out of her.”

“It’s not fluid,” Doug said.

“Then what is it?” asked the doctor.

“Her soul,” Doug said. “That thing stole her soul.”

Pasternak again glanced at Jennings, his face blanched, his wet eyes glazed and haunted. “How do you know this, Doug?”

“I just do. I think it wants me to know.” Suddenly Doug began to writhe on the couch as his respiration accelerated. “Oh, God, now I see . . .”

“What do you see, Doug?”

“Oh dear God, yes, Janet is just standing there like a statue. She’s all frozen and white like if you touched her she would crumble. And she’s staring with wide open eyes that are now blank and featureless, and her mouth is stretched open like she’s still screaming.”

Doug stopped talking, but his jaw was still working, as if his thoughts were no longer being translated into words.

“Do you want me to wake you, Doug?”

“No!”

The outburst was so sudden and so loud that Pasternak recoiled. He looked over at Jennings in alarm. Jennings silently motioned for him to go on.

“Okay, Doug, what else do you see?”

“Jesus Christ, it’s not done yet,” Doug said, almost coming up off the couch. Both Jennings and Pasternak grabbed him to keep him down. Doug was writhing beneath them and wringing his sweaty hands together. “It’s moving toward Lance now, as if something is stretching it. Like the shimmering black skin is stretching. God, if I had to touch it I think I might go mad. And Lance is frozen just like Janet was. Now the thing is standing in front of him. And the same thing is happening all over again. I can’t move. I can’t wake up. I’m frozen in time. Please help me!”

Pasternak gave Jennings another look of alarm but again Jennings nodded for him to continue.

“Lance is screaming now,” Doug continued in a breathless voice. “He’s trying to move, but he can’t. His mouth is twisting into a huge oval, just like Janet’s, and the dark thing is stealing from Lance what it stole from Janet. It’s all going into the darkness, toward that red eye and the terrible darkness. Down-down-down.” Each word Doug spoke was punctuated by a sharp almost violent roll of his head on the pillow. Oh, God, it’s so horrible. I can’t stand it. I can’t breathe.” On the couch, Doug stopped speaking as his chest heaved up and down in great spasms.

“Is that all, Doug?” Pasternak asked. His face was as white as a bleached sheet.

Doug remained silent.

“Doug?”

“No!”  Doug gave his head a quick, almost violent shake.

“No?  What’s happening now?” asked the psychiatrist.

“Someone’s writing on the wall.”

“Someone? Who, Doug?”

“I don’t know. It’s confusing. All I see are streaks and flashes of silvery light and the red eye and . . . God my head’s going to explode.”

“Is the dark thing doing the writing?”

“No hands, no arms, just streaks. Jesus, I can’t tell!”

“What’s he writing, Doug?”

“Symbols not words.”

“What sort of symbols?”

“Lost, Forgotten, Forsaken!”

Jennings stared down at the teenager on the couch. “What?”

“Lost, Forgotten, Forsaken! “Lost, Forgotten, Forsaken! “Lost, Forgotten, Forsaken!” Doug repeated the words in a sort of mantra.

“How do you know what the symbols mean, Doug?”

“In my head. Somehow in my head.”

Pasternak looked at Jennings and his expression said: this can’t be for real. It’s insane. It’s madness.

The police lieutenant’s staid expression said: It may be madness, but it is real.

Pasternak closed his eyes and then slowly opened them. He lifted a handkerchief and mopped his brow with it. “This has got to be some sort of joke,” he said in a low and strained whisper.

Jennings just stared at the man.

Pasternak swallowed audibly staring down at his still unconscious patient, his eyes round and bright. “Doug, do you hear me?”

Doug nodded

“Is that all of it?”

“All of it?” Doug asked “No! Jesus, no! It’s just the beginning.”

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” Pasternak said to Jennings. He looked like he was about to faint.

“Do you want to go on, Doug?” Jennings said.

Doug gave his head a quick nod.

Pasternak glared at Jennings.

Jennings nodded for the doctor to continue the session.

Again Pasternak wiped his sweaty brow. “Go on, Doug,” he said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“Cold,” Doug said.

The doctor looked puzzled. “Cold?”

“Cold,” Doug repeated. “So cold in here. I think I’m freezing to death.” He laid his arms across his chest and hugged himself, shivering. And as Doug breathed, puffs of cold steam came out of his mouth.

The doctor shot the detective an alarmed look. “I don’t believe this,” he whispered in awe. “What kind of trickery is this?”

“There’s no trickery here,” Jennings told the doctor. “And you know it.”

Pasternak looked back at his patient. “This kid doesn’t need a doctor, he needs a fucking exorcist.”

Jennings said nothing.

“Doug?” Pasternak said. “Why are you so cold?”

“It’s the unseen world,” Doug answered. “The House of Bones. It’s so . . . very cold in here.”

“Where is the House of Bones, Doug?” Jennings asked.

“I don’t know. The dark thing won’t tell me, but he takes me there sometimes in my dreams! It’s where the others are. It’s where he keeps them all. But he can’t keep me.”

“Why can’t he keep you, Doug?”

“The plan. He has a plan for me. He wants something that I don’t have yet.”

“What do you mean by that, Doug?”

“Oh, God,” Doug said, writhing on the couch. “He’s turning toward me again, and that one awful red eye is staring out at me from somewhere deep inside the cowl. He wants me to shut up. He doesn’t want me to say any more, spoil the plan, spoil his fun. But he can’t do anything to me. He can’t touch me. Even though I’m only eight years old I know there’s an entire universe inside that thing, a cold and terrifying and unforgiving universe, perhaps the opposite of the one we live in. I’ve been given a glimpse of it, and it wasn’t an accident. It knows me now, and it will never leave me alone until it has what it wants.” Doug was writhing frantically, his hands roaming his body as if he was trying to brush off crawlies. Puffs of steam continued to exit his mouth.

“Doug, what is the plan? What does it want?”

“It wants everything!” Doug said. “And it wants to use me to get it.”

“Use you, how Doug?”

“I don’t know. Something in the future. Something I’m not able to see yet. Please, I want to wake up now.”

The doctor’s round moon face, which moments ago had been a white and sickly pallor, now seemed a little healthier. He looked over at Jennings and Jennings nodded for him to wake the young man on the couch. “If I wake you, Doug, do you think you can remember everything we’ve talked about?”

Doug nodded as his hands continued to roam his body. “Yes,” he said.

“Is there any more that you haven’t told us?”

“Yes.”

“Will you remember what it is after I wake you?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. I’m going to count backwards again from ten, just like I did in the beginning, and by the time I get to number one you’ll be wide awake and feeling refreshed.”

“Okay, yes. Please, wake me, NOW!”

The doctor began the count. But before he’d reached seven Doug’s eyes flew open and he sat bolt-upright as if shot from a cannon. “There,” Pasternak said. “You’re awake. How do you feel?”

“How do you think I feel?” Doug said, massaging the area above the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger.

Jennings handed Doug a cup of water. Doug took it with a trembling hand and drank it all down.

“Do you remember everything that was said, Doug?” asked the doctor.

Doug nodded.

“Doug,” Jennings said. “Under hypnosis you said that there were things you’d remember after you woke that weren’t part of the hypnosis session?”

Doug was silent for a long moment, thinking. “Yeah,” he said finally. “He wants to use me, but I don’t know how. That’s why he targeted me. That’s why he killed all those people. That’s why he killed my parents and that’s why he makes me see terrible things. It’s his only power over me. That’s how he shows me his power. It’s his only way because he can’t touch me. But he can kill or take everything I love.”

“Mother of God,” Pasternak whispered.

“Anything else? Jennings said.

“Yeah, I’ve been there in the place he calls the House of Bones. It’s where he lives.”

“You mentioned that under hypnosis. Do you think you were there physically?”

“No. In my dreams somehow. I don’t think he wants me to go there but he can’t stop me.”

“You said there were others like him there.”

“Yes, but they’re different somehow, subservient, more human. I don’t know. He’s able to use them in ways I don’t understand. The place is like a cave or something, but different.”

“Did you notice anything else about the place?”

“Yeah, it was cold and empty and filled with darkness, and . . . bones.”

“Bones?”

“Yeah, everywhere; the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and the kids were all there.”

“Yes, you said something about that. Please explain.”

“All of them. Tommy and Savannah, and the others. And some I didn’t recognize. They wore funny clothes, like from another time.”

“How many others?”

“I don’t know. A lot. He’s been taking them since long before I started seeing him. He collects them.”

“Were they alive, Doug?” Jennings asked, terribly afraid of what the answer might be but hoping against hope.

“I don’t know. I think they were alive in some way, but probably not in the way that we’re alive.”

Jennings nodded. “Can you think of anything else, Doug?”

“Yeah, the part about the cold universe inside the cowl. I don’t know where that came from, but thinking about it really made me cold. I’m still cold.” Doug hugged his arms to his body and Jennings could have sworn he saw vapor still coming from the young man’s mouth. “I think it’s been there all along, if you want the truth. I just never consciously thought about it until now.”

“Doug, a couple of times you mentioned that it wanted something from you. Do you know what it is that it wants?”

Doug shook his head. “No. It doesn’t want me to know, at least not yet. But it’ll let me know when it does. You can be sure of that.”

—–

The limousine carrying Doug and Annie McArthur left the boulevard, winding down a country lane that passed through citrus groves. Beyond the citrus groves, rows of tall, evenly-spaced palm trees grew from white sand dunes. The forest beyond was a mix of citrus, pine and palms. Avocados as large as New England sugar-maples towered high on either side of the lane, their fruit-laden branches crossing above them, making it appear as though they were riding through a tunnel. As far as the eye could see, the lush forest floor was covered in the serrated-edged leaf-blades of the indigenous Palmetto plant.

The smooth ride of the limo was hypnotizing as Doug’s mind revisited that fateful day when he was eight years old. How many times he’d rehashed that moment, trying to rationalize it, he could not say. But it was always there with him in an odd and painful way, like a tumor at the center of his psyche. Even if he wasn’t conscious of it, it was never very far from recall. And no matter how many times he’d wished the outcome had been different, it always came out the same: the fist in the face, the constellation of stars, and then the terrible visions that had somehow come true. The terrible visions that had led to so many other horrific times in his life. It was all true! But why did it have to be his truth?

—–

He’d come awake in the hospital two days after Tommy Ricker had smashed him in the face with a blinding headache, a small bright light shining in his eyes. His parents, several nurses and a doctor had been standing over him. The doctor was holding a small flashlight in one hand.

“What happened, Dougie?” his mother asked. She had a tight, scared look on her face, and her voice wobbled unnaturally in her throat. “I don’t know,” Doug said, “I think Tommy Ricker must have punched me.”

“How do you feel now, son?” the doctor asked.

“Headache.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Are you sure that’s what happened, Doug?” There was someone else in the room asking that question, but he was out of Doug’s field of vision and he could not see who it was. The voice was not familiar.

Doug’s father spoke next. “Son,” he said. “This is Detective Jennings from the police. He wants to ask you a few questions.”

A heavyset young man stepped into view. He wore a gray, tattered-looking sports jacket with a white shirt open at the collar. He wore no tie. He had thin, sandy-colored hair, a kind and gentle face and very sad brown eyes. To Doug he didn’t look at all like a policeman.

“Are you sure, Doug?” The policeman asked again.

Doug looked from the policeman’s face to his mother’s, his father’s and then the doctor’s. There was something wrong. They all looked sad and afraid at the same time.

“Try to remember, Doug.”

And then suddenly Doug did remember. He remembered everything in that instant, but wished he hadn’t, and he began to feel all panicky and afraid, like he wanted to cry. And although he did remember, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to tell them about it. It was all too crazy, too insane. He wanted it to be a bad dream, but down deep he knew the truth, and his real fear was that they wouldn’t believe him, or worse, that they’d think he did it.

“Tell us, Doug,” said the policeman.

“I saw something.” Doug’s frightened eyes darted back and forth between the doctor and the policeman.

“What did you see?”

“Something happened to Janet, and . . . and then something happened to her boyfriend.”

“What happened to them, Doug?”

“I don’t know. Something. They were screaming and trying to get away.”

“Trying to get away from whom, Doug?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you were in the apartment?”

Doug looked from the policeman to his mother, licking his lips. “No!” he said, and began to cry. “I was outside playing with Tommy and Savannah. I didn’t do it, honest.”

“It’s okay,” his mother consoled. “We know you didn’t.”

Doug looked from one somber face to the next, noticing for the first time that there was a bandage on his nose.

“So, how did you see what happened inside the apartment if you weren’t there?” the policeman asked in a kind and reassuring voice.

“I don’t know. It was like I was dreaming or something.”

The people in the room all shared questioning looks.

“What about Tommy and Savannah?” The policeman asked in a careful voice.

“What about them?”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

Doug stiffened and came up off the bed, his heart pounding in his chest. Little hysterical choking sounds were coming from his throat. “No!” he said. “They were right there, outside playing with me. Please, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t do anything.”

“We believe you, son” the policeman said. “Please now, don’t be upset.”

“The patient needs to rest,” said the doctor. “I think he’s been through quite enough for one day.”

“But I don’t want to rest,” Doug cried out. “I want to know about Tommy and Savannah. Tell me!”

“They’re missing,” the policeman said resignedly. “Are you sure you didn’t see what happened to them?”

“They can’t be missing,” Doug said. His head was swimming with pain and panic. “I was right there. Tommy punched me and I felt something in my head.”

“What did you feel?” the policeman asked.

“The dark thing. I don’t know. It was ugly. It made me scared. I could see it. It had one red eye. It did something to Janet. It did something to Janet’s boyfriend. It made them scream! I heard it whisper!”

“Whisper?” said the police lieutenant. “What did it say?”

“Where are the children?” It said, “Where are the children?”

The room fell silent for a long moment.

“Now I’m going to ask you again,” the policeman, who didn’t look like a policeman, said. “How did you know all this if you were outside?”

“I don’t know. It was like in a dream, I told you, only it was real. I swear it was real.”

“That’s enough!” the doctor said firmly.

“All right,” the policeman replied, never taking his eyes off the boy. “We’re going to let you get some rest now, but when you’re out of the hospital I’d like to come to your house and talk to you some more about this. Would that be okay, Doug?”

Doug looked at his mother’s scared face and got no reaction. “I guess so,” he said.

Three days and an entire battery of tests later Doug was finally allowed to go home. He and his parents were told that a small shard of bone—half an inch long and not much bigger around than a sewing needle—was lodged in his brain’s frontal lobe. It was in an impossible location, removal being far beyond the scope of the day’s technology. “He will be able to live with the shard,” the doctor said. “But his life will probably always be plagued by severe headaches.”

The press had gotten hold of the story, of course. How could it not have? Two people were dead under very mysterious circumstances, and two young children had disappeared without a trace. News spread fast of the boy with the extraordinary sight who had witnessed these mysterious events while in some sort of trance state. The news brought curiosity seekers from all corners of the globe hoping to get a glimpse of the boy with the extraordinary vision.

The McArthurs mostly hid inside their house in the days that followed, bolting their doors and drawing their blinds. For a while they listened to cable news and its endless speculations. Some news divisions even tried to get permission to interview Doug, without success, however. His parents were having none of it. This only added fuel to the fires of their endless speculation.

During his period of recuperation it was Doug’s mother who knew most intimately the way he was thinking. And somehow knowing her son had been fundamentally changed by the incident, she protected him vehemently against anything or anyone who would seek to upset him. But Doug saw that the expression in her eyes had changed. What had once been unconditional love had now degraded into a sort of wary self control. She’d scrutinize him when she thought he wasn’t watching. But she wasn’t fooling him. He recognized the look in her eyes. From the moment he’d begun talking about the mysteries he’d witnessed, she’d been a little bit afraid of him. He supposed there was nothing he could do about that.

In time Doug’s strength returned, the interview requests ceased, and the sightseers went away. By Thanksgiving their little town had mostly returned to normal, and Doug’s brief moment of notoriety was over. Or so he thought. He soon learned that the incident had changed his life forever. At school there were the inevitable whispers, name calling and jokes. He felt curiously immune to it all, and when, after a time, it was plain that he would not respond to the cruelty, he was finally left alone.

A few days following the Thanksgiving holiday there was a knock at the door. Doug opened it to the young policeman whom he’d talked to at the hospital.

“Hi, Doug,” the policeman said with a warm smile. “Remember me? Detective Jennings?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“May I come in?”

“Sure,” Doug said, standing aside. He was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while watching television.

“How are you feeling, son?”

“Still got a headache but otherwise okay.”

Jennings nodded.

Doug’s mother came into the room and stopped cold when she saw the detective.

“I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. McArthur. I’d like to ask Doug a few questions.”

Jane McArthur combed a frustrated hand through her hair and sighed. “Hasn’t he been through enough?”

“Mrs. McArthur, your son is the only link we have to the murder of two people and the disappearance of two others. I really do need to talk to him.”

Doug’s eyes shifted from the policeman and back to his mother. “It’s okay, Mom, really, I don’t mind.”

She knew he needed to talk about it, but she could also see that his eyes were still cloudy and distant. She wondered if they would ever be bright again. An unwitting sob escaped her and she put a trembling hand to her mouth. “I guess so,” she said. “But I want to be in the room when you question him.”

“Absolutely,” said Jennings.

They talked all that morning, mostly about things other than that terrible day; they talked about sports and television and school and books. Halfway through the morning Doug’s mother slipped away to resume the business of running the McArthur household, satisfied, at least for the moment, that the soft-spoken police lieutenant’s motives were noble. She understood that he desperately needed information, but she also knew that he was a diplomat and the only way he was going to get it was to befriend her son.

The detective came by many times after that day and he and Doug did a lot of talking. Sometimes they would go outside together and throw a baseball back and forth or shoot hoops, and on occasion Jennings would take Doug to the Dairy Queen in his police car and buy him an ice cream soda. There was even a time when he took him to a Boston Red Sox game along with his father and another young friend of Doug’s. That had been one of the best times of Doug’s young life.

In time the entire story of what happened on that day did come out, at least as much of the story as Doug could remember, or wanted to remember. It wasn’t until years later, under hypnosis, and at Jennings’ request, that the whole truth was finally revealed. And it would prove more baffling and more frustrating than any lie could have ever been. That was because Jennings unequivocally believed the young man’s story.

A bond was forged between Doug and the policeman that would last into Doug’s adulthood and beyond. One day when Doug was ten years old he confided something to Lieutenant Jennings that he’d never confided to anyone before. They were riding in Jennings’ car, on the way to a little league ball game that Doug was playing in when the boy turned to the man and said: “Tommy and Savannah used to talk to me.”

“You mean back before they disappeared?”

“No, I mean afterwards.”

Although Jennings was shocked by the confession he wasn’t actually surprised. Other things had happened to Doug in the two years since the tragedy that made Jennings believe Doug possessed something others could not even imagine. The boy had this sense. He was psychic, but perhaps he was even more than that, perhaps he had a connection to something beyond the realm of human understanding. One thing was clear to Jennings, however. Doug McArthur was a cursed child, because his psychic visions seemed to bring about only tragedy and heartache. Jennings glanced over at the boy with the somber face and the baseball cap turned around backwards and thought that young Douglas McArthur was probably the saddest little boy he had ever known. “So, they don’t talk to you now?”

Doug shook his head.

“Tell me,” Jennings said, after a long moment in which he had absorbed Doug’s startling disclosure. “What did they say?”

“They talked about the Collector.”

“The Collector?” Jennings said, his interest piqued. “Is that the name they’ve given the dark thing you see in your visions?” Doug nodded. “Did they say who this . . . Collector was?”

“They didn’t know.”

“What else did they tell you, Doug?”

“That he’s very sad. That’s why he collects souls. He’s trying to find one for himself.”

Jennings nodded. “I see. Did they know why this Collector doesn’t have a soul of his own?”

Doug shook his head. “He lost it and he’s trying to get it back.”

“I see,” said Jennings. “Did they say how this Collector treated them?”

Doug shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, I guess. They said it was lonely and they didn’t need to eat. And there were lots of bones there. Mostly they were the bones of birds.”

“Why birds, Doug?”

“I don’t know.”

Jennings nodded. “Did they say anything else?”

“Yeah, it’s cold there, so cold and so empty.”

—–

Doug was hauled out of his reverie by the sound of Theo talking on the phone in a low voice, but mostly he wasn’t talking at all, just listening with an occasional, yes, sir, or no, sir thrown in for effect. Doug understood that he was receiving instructions from his master.

A left turn took them to an iron gate of considerable height. The limo stopped and a uniformed guard came into view. Theo nodded and the gate began to trundle open. On either side of the gate, a massive stone fence, equally as tall as the gate and topped with ominous strands of razor wire, stretched in a convoluted route along the borders of the estate like some miniature and menacing version of China’s Great Wall. Doug understood that this was a prison of sorts, designed more to keep the outside world at bay than to keep people in.

Stationed along the fence, more guards; others walked the estate’s perimeter, some with dogs.

They drove through the gates of De Roché Manor and into another world; lawns laid out immaculately on either side of the paved driveway; a distant aspect of woodland off to the left which disappeared behind a line of cypresses as they bore around toward the house itself. Off to the right stretched a line of one hundred foot sand palms; there was an enormous marble pond with a spurting fountain surrounded by carved marble figures, human and animal alike, and in the distance, the Gulf of Mexico gleamed at them through a line of beach pines, shimmering like freshly polished silver in the brilliant southern sunshine.

The main building was less spectacular than Doug remembered; just a large, white, three-story Greek-revival house, solid but plain, with modern extensions sprawling away from the main structure on either end. They drove past the front door, with its formal Corinthian-columned porch, and stopped on a tarmac near a side entrance.

“Mr. De Roché is waiting in his study,” Theo told them.

Doug grunted thanks, wondering if Theo was just a simple errand boy, but knowing down deep that he wasn’t.

The chopper landed right on schedule. Jennings was shown to a waiting car. He got in and sat back trying to relax. But there was no way in hell he could. All his muscles were tensed and his mind worried. Spencer seemed quite anxious to pin these deaths on McArthur? McArthur was a suspect; there was no doubt about it. But perhaps he was more than a suspect. What if the government had been watching him since—? The thought struck Jennings suddenly that perhaps they’d never taken their eyes off him. Yes, it was a definite possibility. Frankly Jennings was a little surprised they’d waited this long to make their move. He supposed that guys who could see the kinds of things McArthur could see were valuable. Sure they were. Doug’s was a rare gift and the government wanted to dissect him, to see what made him tick, and they were looking for an excuse to grab him. Jennings was suddenly and absolutely certain of it. McArthur would be a hell of a guinea pig for those CIA spooks to dissect.

But right now he couldn’t think about that. He needed to find a way to contact Doug and warn him of his suspicions. The man needed protection from his own fucking government. He knew that Doug wasn’t capable of murder. Hell, the man wouldn’t harm a bee if one was stinging him. But they would accuse him to get what they wanted, wouldn’t they?

Jennings needed a clear head and some time to think. Unfortunately that wasn’t going to happen. Everything was moving too fast, and he felt like he was caught in the middle of a nightmare. He sat forward in his seat as they approached the circus, his muscles tense like over-stressed strings on a musical instrument.

The crime scene was an average suburban home on an average street in a very average small New England town. The place had a front porch, a two car garage and a lawn with two towering oak trees growing up out of it like titanic guardians. One of the trees even had a rope swing attached to a rugged-looking horizontal branch. Right now, however, the house, as well as most of the street, was roped off, and inside the cordon there was a buzz of activity. There were at least ten parked emergency vehicles with people moving busily to and from them. Outside the barricade, Jennings noted as they passed, were several news vans and a crowd of anxious-looking spectators. As he got out of the car a crowd of reporters moved toward him in a wave.

“Can you give us any information?” A young man asked breathlessly, a cameraman at his side.

How they knew he was a cop, Jennings couldn’t say. Maybe he smelled like one. His shirt was stuck to his back and his underarms were wet. Yeah, that must be it. He smelled like a fucking pig. He tried to smile as he pushed his solid frame through the crowd but could only manage a grimace. “As you can see, I just arrived,” he said. “Don’t know any more than you do. Maybe less.” He pushed past the crowd of reporters and spectators and into the cordoned off zone.

He stepped up onto the porch and peered through the open door. The first body he saw nearly undid him. The kid just stood there like a statue, frozen in time. He looked freeze dried. Nothing about him looked real. Not even his clothes. Everything seemed calcified. His hair stood straight up like slivers of glass. The face was stretched unnaturally, elongated somehow in an almost supernatural way, the mouth wide open in a silent scream. The eyes were open and dull-white, no pupils or corneas, more like the eyes of some renaissance sculpture than those of a human being. They seemed to be staring out at some unseen horror. A team of crime scene investigators hovered around the body, photographing, carefully taking samples.

Spencer stepped out onto the porch from inside the house walking carefully lest he step on some important piece of evidence. He was of medium height but solid, as though there were flexed muscles beneath his dark-colored suit jacket. His sandy hair was short-cropped and his complexion was deeply-tanned, like he’d just stepped out of the Florida sun. To Jennings he looked like ex-military. “Rick,” Spencer said extending his hand, “glad you could make it.”

Jennings ignored the outstretched hand. He could not take his eyes off the kid. Cold shivers ran through him as if he was witnessing something extraordinarily evil. “Where are the others?” he asked.

Self-consciously Spencer dropped his hand, turned and led Jennings into the house. The mother and father sat in their chairs looking pretty much the way the kid looked, frozen in time, calcified, and like the kid on the porch the faces were stretched in an almost supernatural way, eyes dull-white and staring, mouths open in twin silent ovals that made it look like the victims had been screaming in their moment of death. They’d seen whatever had done this to them. There was no doubt about that. The terror frozen in their eyes didn’t lie.

The room was crawling with forensic people. Just to the left of the door lay a dog on its side. It looked just like the humans, freeze dried, calcified, its mouth open in an eternal howl. Even its fur seemed brittle, standing straight up like glass stalagmites.

“Jesus,” Jennings said, frowning down at the dog. “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck seems to be the operative question of the day,” said Spencer.

Jennings attention was immediately drawn to something on the wall above the television. Three symbols that looked like words in some exotic language had been drawn meticulously in what looked like heavy black ink.

He’d seen the symbols before but didn’t know what they meant, didn’t know if they meant anything, for that matter. He moved closer to the wall and stopped abruptly, staring. There was another image below the three word-symbols. Jennings had no idea what it was but it looked something like the broken off point of an ancient arrow. It seemed to have been photo flashed there by some method he’d never seen before.

Jennings studied it, cocking his head this way and that. “What does it mean?”

“Don’t know,” said Spencer.

“Looks like some sort of artifact,” Jennings said. “Old. Like maybe an arrowhead or the point of a spear.”

“That’s what it looks like to us, too,” Spencer said and shrugged.

“What about the symbols above it?” Jennings asked, more than a little curious.

“They’re Aramaic. It’s an ancient language, sort of like Hebrew only older. From the time of Christ.”

“Jesus,” Jennings said, “how the hell do you know—?”

“Nothing too complex,” Spencer interrupted. “The bureau employs experts in ancient languages.”

“That’s a surprise,” Jennings said sarcastically. “How long have you known about this?”

“Years.”

Jennings shot Spencer a look of utter disdain. “What does it say?”

“Tleeqa, which means “Lost”, Shweeqa, which means “Forsaken”, and Minshiya which means “Forgotten”, respectively.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Jennings said.

“Wouldn’t think of it, Rick.”

Jennings thought for a minute before showing Spencer his bared teeth. “So, Doug was right. He knew when he was eight years old what those symbols meant.”

“Well, for some reason he was able to translate them. I’m not sure he knew what they meant. What do you think, Rick?”

“Don’t have a clue, Spencer. But I can see that you boys have really done some homework on this one.”

“It’s our job, Rick. You didn’t really think we forgot about those other cases just because they weren’t solved, did you? Christ, they were the most exciting things to happen to the bureau in years.”

“Exciting?” Jennings said in amazement. “People died. Lives were ruined.”

“Not my fault,” Spencer replied. “My job was to find out who or what did this.”

“Yeah, well did you have any success?”

“No thanks to you.”

“Wait a minute—”

“No, you wait a minute, Rick. You were the one closest to the boy who saw all this shit happen yet you wouldn’t let us near him.”

“He was just a kid.”

“Well, he’s not a kid anymore, and we will do whatever it takes to protect the national security.”

Jennings face became hot with rage and he had to fight to keep his hands from going around Spencer’s neck. “Don’t you use the national fucking security card with me, Spencer.”

“It’s all I’ve got, Rick. And I’m free to use it at will.”

Jennings concentrated on his breathing, trying to get himself under control. “So what is this nut case trying to tell us?”

Spencer shrugged his shoulders. “Lost, Forsaken, Forgotten. Don’t have a clue, but there are theories. We have shrinks in the bureau, too, you know. Maybe he wasn’t loved the way he thought he should have been as a child. Maybe he was spurned by a lover. Who the fuck knows why these nut jobs do the things they do.”

“So you’re assuming the guy who did this is human?” Jennings said.

Spencer smiled dryly. “Aren’t you?”

“I’ve never seen a human do this.”

“So you’re willing to buy into the possibility that he’s not?”

Jennings narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m willing to buy, Spencer. This whole thing is crazy if you ask me. I thought it was over a long time ago. Christ!” He sighed in frustration. “What about that symbol beneath the words?”

“Photos have been sent to Washington.” Again Spencer shrugged. “We’re working on it. It seems to have somehow been transferred onto the wall as though it’s real and not just a drawing. If you look closely it appears to be in bas-relief and it looks like it’s made of stone.” Jennings put his hand up as if to touch the symbol. “Don’t touch it!” Spencer said and Jennings’ hand froze midway. “We’ve got a team coming in to remove that piece of wall, take it back to the lab. No one’s ever seen anything like it and we don’t want it contaminated.”

On the stand beside the TV Jennings spied a family photo. Not able to wrap his brain around the image he was seeing on the wall, he strode over and picked the photo up examining it. “This is them, right?” He said, pointing a beefy finger. “The whole family.”

Spencer nodded.

“There are four people in the picture. I only saw three bodies,” Jennings said. “Where’s the little girl?” But even as he asked the question, Jennings thought he knew.

Spencer motioned for Jennings to follow him. In the kitchen he spoke in low tones. “That’s the part I didn’t want to mention over the air. The little girl, her name is Trinity. She’s six years old. No one knows where she is.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“We’re not jumping to any conclusions yet. There’s no evidence that she was taken.”

Jennings began to breathe a little unsteadily. “Well, where the hell is she then?”

“We’re looking into it, checking with all known relatives and close friends.”

“Who found the bodies?”

“When the father didn’t show up for work and nobody would answer the phone, his employer sent someone over. The porch door was open and he saw the boy.”

“Did he go into the house?”

“No way. He went back to his car and called the police on his cell phone.”

“So he didn’t see the little girl.”

Spencer shook his head. “Nobody saw her.  Listen, Rick, this is the main reason I called you down here. It’s . . . well . . . it’s just like the last time, up in Maine. Remember?”

Jennings stared at Spencer with an expression close to contempt. “Of course I remember. I’m the one who called you, for Christ’s sake. Are you telling me . . .?”

“That’s right,” said Spencer, his expression dour. “There’s no forensic evidence in this house that proves she ever existed.”

“Jesus Christ,” was all Jennings was capable of saying and it came out as a whisper.

Spencer said, “Her clothes are in her bedroom along with her toys, pictures, even a birth certificate. She’s got relatives and all the neighbors remember her. But there’s no scientific evidence that she was ever in this house, no scientific evidence that she ever existed, for that matter. No fingerprints, no hairs, no epidermis. There’s nothing in her bed or the bathroom or the kitchen. Nothing! The house is filled with forensic evidence of all the family members. All except her. That sound familiar, Rick?”

Wiped clean, Jennings thought. Like she was never born. Impossible. Sweat poured off him. He didn’t want to think about what Spencer was trying to force him to think about. But he couldn’t help himself. He remembered a very young and a very vulnerable-looking Doug McArthur lying in a hospital bed with his face taped up trying to absorb the reality that the two young friends he had been playing with just hours before, had vanished without a trace. In his mind the boy hadn’t seen the kids disappear, but he had seen the carnage in the second floor apartment that preceded their disappearance. And there had been others. Oh yes. Like the one nine years later, when Doug had returned home on summer vacation from the University of Maine. It was early in the morning and Jennings and Doug had been trout fishing two hundred and fifty miles north of Portland in the great Maine wilderness, a place known as Sandy Bend, when the young man had gone into what Jennings first thought was some sort of seizure. Without warning Doug fell to the ground and began to twitch and moan, holding his head in agony, chanting about terrible things being done to people and of a little girl who was trapped in a very dark place.

After Doug came to, Jennings had asked him if he remembered anything.

Doug had stared at him for a long time before answering, and Jennings had never seen such agony in a person’s eyes. “It’s just like Tommy and Savannah,” he said. “I can’t quite see where she is.” He shook his head and said, “But she’s calling to me, just like they did. She’s telling me she’s trapped in a place called the House of Bones. She’s suffering, and I don’t know how to help her.”

“Did you see anything else?” Jennings had asked Doug.

After a moment Doug nodded and said, “Yeah, it was him, the thing that calls itself the Collector. It’s so evil I can’t stand to look at it. But he makes me look at him.”

“Are you sure it’s the same entity, Doug?”

Doug nodded. “A dark thing covered in leathery skin and wearing a cowl. It wants me to see. It wants me to know what it does. But there are others with him there too.”

“Others?” Jennings said puzzled.

“Yeah, in the House of Bones. They’re like him but different somehow. More human. I think they work for him, do his bidding or something. Maybe things he can’t do for himself. I think he’s the boss, the Collector, I mean; he’s the real bad ass. He’s the one that takes the kids there. Only he can do that. That’s where he took the little girl.”

“How do you know all this, Doug?”

“I don’t know. For some reason I’m tapped into him. I have been since that day Tommy Ricker punched me in the nose. I can’t explain it. Maybe he needs me to know for some reason.”

The fishing trip to Sandy Bend had been ruined by another of Doug’s visions and as a result had to be cut short. Later that night, after they had returned home from Sandy Bend, the news of the deaths and the disappearance was all over the television. It had happened at almost the exact moment Doug had seen it happen in his vision. Doug had been absolutely right, again. Upon investigating, the man and woman had looked just like the people in this house: freeze dried husks, mouths stretched open in silent screams. And there was no forensic evidence proving the little girl had ever existed. Just exactly like this case, and all the others before it, except for one thing. Although the killer had left some sort of signature at all the scenes, a signature that made no sense—LOST, FORSAKEN, FORGOTTEN—this was the first time he’d left a symbol. It was like the symbol was another piece of some larger puzzle, and the killer had left it hoping someone smart would play the game with him; perhaps he was hoping that Doug, the one person on earth who was capable of seeing these atrocities—as far as Jennings knew—would play the game with him.

Jennings had known Doug was gifted, or cursed, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it, but until that moment he’d been unaware of the extent of pain the young man’s affliction caused. For weeks following each incident Doug would awake in the night with the vanished children calling out to him in supplication. They were all in some unimaginable and torturous place, Doug explained, but he was powerless to help them. And it was killing him to know that. The voices began to fade as time passed, however, and this one was no different, so by the time Doug had gone back to college nearly a month after the incident, the child’s pleading voice had faded to just a whisper that soon would become non-existent. It was always like that, he told Jennings. Immediately following the disappearances the pleading voices of the lost children were strong, fading slightly as each day went by before eventually going totally silent. Doug also told Jennings that he was afraid of what that meant, that with each passing day the chances of saving the children became less and less until it was too late.

That next year, following graduation, Doug had married Annie De Roché. That had been more than eight years ago, and as far as Jennings knew Doug had never experienced another incident.

At least none he’d confided in Jennings about.

Until now.

But he wasn’t sure Doug had experienced another incident.

Was he kidding himself?

Why here? Why now? These deaths seemed so random. It was northern New Hampshire, almost two hours from where McArthur lived in Scarborough, Maine. Could he, in some way, be connected to them? Doug and Annie were gone; there was no doubt about that. Their house had been destroyed. They’d been chased by gunmen.

Spencer was droning on about something in the very background of Jennings’ thoughts. “Rick, are you listening to me?”

“I hear you loud and clear, Spencer,” Jennings said, even though he hadn’t heard one word the asshole had spoken. He performed an almost military about face and strode back into the living room leaving Spencer with a puzzled expression on his face. The teams were still busy with the bodies, taking samples, photographing, swabbing, examining hair and teeth. Jennings stared at them, shaking his head. “What do you make of this?” he asked a man who looked to be in charge of the forensic team.

“Supernatural,” the small bespectacled man responded, getting up from examining one of the husks.

“Rick Jennings, this is Tad Kohler,” Spencer said, coming into the room. “He’s the FBI’s lead CSI on the case.”

Jennings nodded, avoiding shaking the man’s latex-sheathed hand. “What did you mean by that?” asked Jennings.

“What, supernatural?” Kohler’s laugh was small and a little unsettling. “It was a joke.” Everybody in the room stopped what they were doing and looked over at Kohler, and Jennings thought it was because none of this was actually very funny. Kohler nervously cleared his throat. “That’s the only explanation I can come up with,” he said, his face reddening slightly. “Nothing else makes sense.”

“Give me your best shot as to what happened to these people,” Jennings said.

Kohler looked nervously around the room. All eyes were on him and all ears were tuned to what he might say. “You want logical?”

“I want what you think happened.”

Kohler nodded. “Whatever it was happened fast, okay? I can tell you that. But not so fast that the victims didn’t know what hit them. Just look at their expressions. Tell me they didn’t see their killer.”

Jennings did not respond.

“I think the killer purposely left them this way,” Kohler continued. “He wanted us to see their expressions. He wanted us to know their terror. I can’t think of anything in the real world that could accomplish something like this.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“These bodies seem to be mummified in some way. But not like other mummified bodies I’ve seen. Those were done with chemicals. These were done almost instantaneously, as if everything had been sucked out of them in an instant. These killings are like a work of art. They were done for effect, for shock value. The sole purpose was to instill terror.”

“It’s working,” said one of the female techs who kept glancing furtively around the room as though the killer might reappear at any second for another round of fun and games.

Suddenly the whole room went still, not a soul stirred. Everyone alert for what Kohler might say next and perhaps dreading it.

“We’ll have to get them back to the lab, of course,” Kohler continued, “you know, before I can draw any final conclusions, but . . .”

“But what?” Jennings said. The room was suddenly alive with electric energy. Jennings could see by the look on Spencer’s face that he was just as creeped out as the rest of them. “You have something more to tell us, Kohler?”

Kohler was now looking a little sheepish. “I don’t know.” He faltered momentarily. “It’s just a feeling.”

“A feeling?”

“Yeah, you feel it too, don’t you? I can tell.”

Jennings did not answer the man. He might have to be truthful with him, and right now the truth seemed much too spooky. He felt static run in the hairs on his arms and gooseflesh erupt over his entire body. Inside the room you could have cut the dread with a knife.

“It’s like there’s something still here,” Kohler said, looking around the room as his eyes suddenly darkened with terror. “Some kind of residue or something left here by the killer. It feels like evil.” He pointed at the Aramaic words written on the wall and the symbol beneath them. “He left that for a reason. These people were more than murdered,” he said. “If I was a religious man, which I’m not, I’d say that their souls were taken. That’s what it feels like to me, anyway. Yep, I’d say somebody walked right in here last night and sucked the souls right out of them.”

The Blackhawk helicopter was waiting at idle when Jennings got to the airport. There were no problems with security. They rushed him right through. He boarded the military transport, strapping his hulking frame into a seat as a crew member handed him a headset.

“What’s this for?”

“Things are noisy,” the crewman hollered above the racket. “Besides, the boss man wants to talk to you.” Jennings nodded and put the headset on. The chopper’s engines whined distantly as the craft lifted into the air. The airport slid away beneath him giving way to the Portland skyline, a jagged coastline, and finally, open ocean.

“Jennings, can you hear me?”

Jennings reached up and adjusted the mouthpiece. “Yeah, I hear you fine.”

“You’ll be here in about thirty minutes. You’ll be touching down at Pease International Tradeport. The scene is just ten minutes from there. There’ll be a car waiting.”

“What have you done with the bodies?”

“We haven’t moved them. They’re still at the scene exactly as they were found. Forensics has been poring over them trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

“So you say it’s the same MO as those people back in the nineties? The ones McArthur saw in his visions?”

“No doubt about it. That’s the reason I wanted you down here. You were the guy that introduced me to the kid. He told me how he’d seen the murders in some sort of . . . trance-state or something. I’ll tell you what, spooked the shit out of me.”

“I wish I’d never said a word.”

“Why, Rick? Were you trying to protect him?”

“God damn it, Spencer, I wasn’t trying to protect anybody. The kid had suffered enough.”

“Yeah, I know. He was sort of famous, or should I say infamous, back before that. Don’t think I wasn’t interested in what was going on, because I was. Just like everybody else. All the talk shows wanted him and the tabloids wrote about the things he’d seen—”

“Most of it was bull shit!”

“I know, I know, but, Christ, he even saw his own parents die. How tough can that be?”

“What’s this about, Spencer?”

“I’m not sure,” Spencer said. “I just can’t figure out McArthur’s connection to it all.”

“Simple, there is no connection.”

“I don’t think you believe that, Rick.”

“Listen, Spencer, he’s clairvoyant. He sees things. Or he used to. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“Does McArthur still live in the area?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact he and his wife Annie are friends of mine.”

“What do you mean by friends? Like beer buddies and backyard barbecues?”

What the hell was Spencer doing? Did he know about this morning? If so then why was he being so coy? Suddenly Jennings didn’t trust the slimy bastard. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“Do you think he . . . saw these murders last night?”

“What are you, crazy?”

“No. Actually I’m quite sane. Probably saner than I’ve been in a long time.”

“Listen, as far as I know McArthur’s visions were gone by the time he became an adult.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I told you, I’m his friend.”

“Have you talked to him this morning?”

Christ, Spencer did know. The fucking FBI had been on top of this from the beginning. He should have known. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Spencer, but—”

“What I’m getting at, Rick is, as far as I know nothing like this has happened in ten years. And this morning McArthur’s house blows up and in its wake he leaves two square miles of carnage. A little bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“That’s all it is, Spencer. Coincidence! Period!”

“Where do you suppose McArthur is right now?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Do you think it’s possible that perhaps whatever causes him to see these terrible things came awake and he just went nuts?”

“And he blew his own house up and killed people, and then zipped on down to New Hampshire and killed some more? No, I don’t think that’s possible. It isn’t logical—”

“These deaths aren’t logical, Rick.”

“Listen, those guys were trying to kill them, in case you didn’t know. He was simply trying to protect himself and his wife.”

“You know that for a fact, huh?”

“I was at the scene all morning and that’s what the preliminary evidence suggests. And it’s what I believe, yes. I told you, I know the guy. But it’s now out of my hands. I was taken off the case. The feds are involved and you know it, Spencer, so why don’t you fucking start leveling with me.”

“That’s one of the reasons I called you, Rick. To . . . deal you back in.”

“You son-of-a-bitch, Spencer.”

“It wasn’t me, Rick. It’s not personal. It’s just that the people upstairs thought you were a little too close to McArthur to be objective.”

“Bastards!”

“Relax, Jennings. It was my decision to bring you back in.”

“Thinking that I’d be able to lead you to McArthur. Well, you’re wasting your time. I don’t have a fucking clue where he is.”

“I believe you, Rick.”

“Do the boys upstairs believe it?”

“They don’t have to. At least not yet.”

“Doesn’t sound like I’m being dealt back in at all. Sounds more like you’re trying to get me as far away from the case as possible.”

“Not so, Rick. Actually I’m putting you right back in the middle of it.”

“You can’t actually believe that McArthur was involved in the murder of a family two hours away from his home? I told you, it’s not logical.”

“Oh, but I think it is. I think if he saw these murders and if he didn’t do them, then I believe he’s capable of leading us to whoever did. And furthermore, I think you’ll agree when you get here.”

“You bastards just want to grab him, don’t you? You’ve been waiting for an opportunity. Take his mind apart, see what makes him tick.”

“Rick, we could have had him any time we wanted.”

“But now you’ve got the excuse you need, right? I told you, I don’t know where he is.”

“That’s okay, Rick, we do.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Silence.

“Spencer?”

“I can’t say any more. This line’s not secure. We’ll talk when you get here.”

Now Jennings was more confused than ever. What if Doug was connected in some way to these deaths? Even though he knew Doug well, or thought he knew him, they never talked much about what happened back when he was a kid. Those regressive sessions back when he was in college had been the end of it as far as he was concerned. He’d come away believing that McArthur had some sort of psychic ability period, an ability to see the future, to see murder and mayhem in its most brutal form, and the most difficult one to believe: perhaps the ability to see the supernatural creature behind the murders. Jennings couldn’t explain any of it and he’d given up trying a long time ago. McArthur’s sight went far beyond the territory of ordinary police investigative work into the realm of the unexplained. What he did know was that Doug’s sight had diminished as he’d grown older until it was nearly non- existent. At least that’s what Jennings believed because Doug never talked about it any more. Growing up had been a tough time for the kid, losing his parents like he had and the media circus that had followed. No, he wasn’t the least bit sure Doug would say a word even if he knew. And he wouldn’t blame him.

But Jennings was still uneasy. This was all happening so fast he wasn’t sure of his instincts. The feds wanted McArthur, there was no doubt about that. Maybe they already had him. And their interest in him went far beyond this particular case. Jennings was suddenly sure of it.

“Tell you what, Spencer,” Jennings said. “Let’s wait until I see the bodies so I can get a handle on this thing. I don’t know if these killings are the same thing as before.”

“They’re the same all right, Jennings, and I think you’ll agree when you see them.”

“What if it’s some sort of copy cat?”

“Wait till you see the evidence, and then tell me that.” The line suddenly went dead. Evidently Spencer was through talking.

Jesus Christ,” Jennings thought, settling back in his seat. I need to talk to Doug.

The jet taxied to a stop. When the attendant opened the door, a dreadful blast of heated air rushed into the aircraft cabin, reminding Doug of a sauna. He hated saunas almost as much as he hated Florida. They both gave him claustrophobia. He took Annie by the hand and led her down the steps to the tarmac. A black limo sat at idle patiently waiting.

The driver was a solid muscular man who looked like he’d been sculpted from stone. His hair was black as wet tar, his skin, olive and he was appallingly handsome.

“Hi,” he said casting a small polite smile at Doug and a bright, toothy grin at Annie. He held the door. “I’m Theo. Mr. De Roché sent me. You must be Annie?”

“Yes,” Annie said, falling into the car. “This’s Doug,” she said slurring her speech.

Doug shook the man’s hand.

“Terribly sorry about Mrs. De Roché,” Theo said frowning. “She was a lovely lady.”

“Yeah,” Annie said listlessly, “I suppose she was.”

Theo maneuvered the limo along Airport Road before pulling out into heavy late-morning traffic. Before they knew it they were cruising across Tampa Bay en rout to the Suncoast. In the distance the great silver arch of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge glimmered brightly. White triangles speckled the bay’s choppy blue surface.

At Clearwater they turned north on U.S. Alternate 19 toward Palm Harbor. Inside the limousine cold air blasted, reminding Doug of the world they’d just stepped out of. He and Annie sat mostly in silence, she leaning limply against him.

Palm-thronged mansions zipped by, white and spatial, with tall gates of wrought-iron suspended between whitewashed Corinthian columns. Red bougainvillea blossoms, stripped from their vines by the winds of early morning thunderstorms, blew across the road ahead of them, and for a moment they seemed to be caught in a crimson snowstorm. Annie didn’t seem to notice, just sat staring dazedly out the window.

“Bad thunderstorms this morning,” Theo said over his shoulder, as if reading Doug’s thoughts. “Weather report’s calling for more later on. Supposed to be some real killers. How’re things up in . . . Maine?” He made it sound like he wasn’t entirely sure they were from Maine, or perhaps he didn’t quite believe Maine was actually a place.

“Wet and cold,” Doug said, hoping his shortness was indication enough that he wished to be left alone with his thoughts. He didn’t like the way Theo kept glancing at Annie in the rear view mirror, like prey sizing up meat. But Doug supposed if he was in Theo’s position he’d be looking too.

Doug sat back in the limo’s plush leather seat and sighed, remembering Annie waking him up on that morning three months ago when he’d first learned of the pregnancy. She’d been playing with him under the sheets, one hand cupping his balls, the other stroking his cock. Once satisfied that he was sufficiently hard, she’d put her hands on his haunches and lifted her lithe body atop his, her undulations effortlessly guiding him inside her. Annie was elegantly and shamelessly female, and Doug was always amazed at her prowess as a love maker. Afterward they lay together silently basking in the afterglow.

“Doug?” she whispered.

“Yeah?” Jerked back from a contented doze, Doug opened his eyes, a little bemused, a little annoyed.

She was stroking the soft hair of his sternum. “Everything’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

She was giving him that, I-want-to-be-serious-because-I’m-feeling-a-little-insecure kind of look. Doug could never imagine how someone like Annie could ever feel insecure.

“Well, I was just thinking . . . when we have a baby we don’t really have to worry about anything, do we?”

Doug’s heart-rate picked up. He pulled back slightly, gazing quizzically at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you know, things. Money and education and all that stuff?”

“No, no, I mean, why are you talking about this?”

“I’m talking about having a baby.”

“I know. I thought we’d decided against children, at least for now.”

“We did, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Doug, that was eight years ago . . .”

Doug felt panic rise in him. “No, Annie. It’s out of the question.”

Annie pulled away pouting. “Why does it always have to be out of the question? And why do you get the only vote?”

“Because we’re not ready. Because . . .”

“I’m pregnant, Doug.”

Doug felt like he’d been sucker punched. Jumping out of bed and landing flat-footed on the floor, he cried, “Jesus Christ! You’re what?”

Annie began to cry. “It wasn’t my fault, Doug. I’m sorry. I take my pill faithfully every day. The doctor said that sometimes these things happen. That nothing is infallible.”

“Annie? Annie, please don’t cry. I’m really not mad, just shocked is all.”

“You’re not mad? Honest?”

In that moment Doug thought his heart would surely burst with joy. “Honest.”

“I’ve been trying so hard to find a way to tell you. I’m so glad. I’m so happy, Doug.”

“Me too.” He dropped to his knees and took her in his arms embracing her fiercely. Tears began rising in his eyes and before he could get himself under control they were spilling over onto his cheeks. Actually he’d been relieved. Up till then he’d felt terrible because he knew Annie wanted kids. Hell, he wanted kids, but that underlying dread at the thought of what might happen if they did have a baby would never quite go away, and although time had a way of making light of issues that once seemed important, deep down Doug knew that De Roché was not the kind of man who would ever forget; he was a man of his convictions, perverted as they might be, and his convictions were most likely the very secret of his tremendous success. He’d been waiting all these years, a patient man, a man who always got what he wanted.

But on that morning, a whole three months before the shit hit the fan, Annie and Doug were alive and happy and there was a child, their child, growing inside her. They were free and in love, and life was good and brimming with hope and possibilities. Dark clouds were for another day.

He and Annie had gone back to bed that morning and made love for a second time. This one had been Doug’s, and he’d made sure it had been a long and deep and ecstatic kind of love.

“Annie, I love you,” he’d said afterwards as he held her. And it was true. In his life he had never loved anyone like he loved Annie. Perhaps he had once loved his mom and dad as much, but now he could not remember, because the pain of their loss had been so great that he had willingly allowed the years to wipe the memory of his love for them clean. Aunt Tessa, the kind and gentle woman who had raised him to adulthood, had tried to get him to love her, but he had never quite dared to. The fear of losing someone else he loved was more than he could bear. He had treated her with the kindness and respect that she had expected and deserved, but he was not sure he had ever actually allowed himself to love her.

But as he’d grown into adulthood, as the years and the terrible memories had faded behind him, he began to open up a little more with each passing year. Thus, when the time had come, he had given himself wholly to Annie.

The morning he’d found out about the pregnancy was the happiest morning of his life; there was no doubt about that. But there had been a bad thing in amongst all the happiness. A distant storm filled with ominous clouds. It was the terrible secret that he’d kept from Annie all these years, the knowledge that what was theirs might not really be theirs at all, that in some terrible and twisted place there were men who made deals for the souls of the innocent.

It was nearly 10 am before Portland Police Lieutenant Richard Jennings left the scene of Doug and Annie McArthur’s ruined house and the subsequent carnage left in its wake. Five men were dead from gunshot wounds; none had been carrying identification. Even worse, there had been a massive pileup on both the north and southbound lanes of Interstate 95. Two motorists were dead and six were in the hospital, three in critical condition. Two separate individuals had come forward saying that their cars had been hijacked by gunmen. One had identified photos of Doug and Annie McArthur; the other had no idea who the two gunmen were that threw her out of her vehicle, and furthermore, she could not adequately describe them. For unknown reasons, their faces were just blanks, she told authorities.

Following the initial stages of the investigation, things had happened fast. The State Police had quickly moved in and taken charge of the investigation, followed almost immediately by people in plain dark suits that Jennings recognized as federal agents. When he quizzed them about what agency they worked for he was given the cold shoulder. The State Police were gone in a heartbeat, leaving Jennings to deal with the feds. For the most part they were rude assholes who treated Jennings like a boy scout. By mid-morning they’d dismissed him altogether, telling him in no uncertain terms that his help was no longer needed on the case. He was too close to McArthur and his wife to be objective. Jennings had left the scene feeling like a beaten dog, vowing that there was no way he was going to sit idly by while his best friends were in trouble and on the run.

Jennings had dealt with feds before, on a number of cases, but these guys were different; darker moods, more secretive, much more efficient than what he was used to dealing with. And he never did get the name of the bureau they worked for. His natural instincts put him on guard, made him suspicious, but when he voiced his concerns to his own superiors he was told to back off, to let it be. Things were different in a post-911 world.

Jennings could not believe such a thing had happened and there were a million unanswered questions hammering his sore brain. He’d known Doug since he was a child; they were good friends. And Annie, Doug’s beautiful and gracious wife was a genuine sweetheart. Why would anyone want to hurt them?  They had a perfect life. And why were the feds involved? Who were the fuckers? Nothing made sense.

He did some asking around on the sly. Mostly he got the cold shoulder. An old friend with the State Police told him he wasn’t supposed to talk about it but since they were old drinking buddies he’d give him what he knew, which wasn’t much. Speculation ran the gamut from drug deal gone bad to a botched professional hit. Jennings had to stifle a laugh. He knew Doug wasn’t a drug dealer or a user. It was the most absurd thing he’d ever heard. So why would professionals want to kill them? As far as he knew there were no skeletons in Doug’s closet. He believed, or at least wanted to believe, that by now most people had forgotten about Doug’s precognitive escapades as a child. Why would anybody want to bring all that back up? It was ancient history. More than ten years had passed since the last incident. There could be no financial gain by dredging all that shit back to the surface. Too many things had happened since. The world had moved on in new and dangerous ways.

There was one possibility, however. Although Jennings liked Annie immensely, he knew very little about her and her relationship with the De Rochés, her rich and powerful family. He did wonder from time to time how a beautiful woman from such an influential family could be happy living such a modest life. But whenever these thoughts intruded he would only have to think of Doug and he knew the answer. Douglas McArthur was one of the most likeable, honest and sincere people he had ever known. The man was kind and generous and so filled with life that it glowed about him, almost like an aura. Jennings was witness to the way he and Annie treated each other and understood that their love was the most powerful thing in their lives.

Just the same, perhaps there was a connection between Annie and the things that had happened this morning. It seemed a remote possibility, but he would have to start somewhere. He would try and contact her family today and ask some frank questions. Fuck the feds and fuck the politics. He didn’t need any of it. He’d fly below the radar, conduct his own investigation. He just wished Doug would call him.

As he sat at his desk drinking coffee and running all of these ruminations over in his mind, the telephone rang. He snatched it up and said, “This is Jennings. How can I help you?”

“Lieutenant Jennings, this is Seth Baxter, I work for Doug McArthur. Do you remember me? We met at a barbecue at Doug’s house.”

Jennings sat upright in his chair. “Of course, Seth, have you heard from them?”

“Doug called about an hour ago.”

“Where is he?”

“He wouldn’t say. He told me it wasn’t safe, that they were okay, but someone had tried to kill them and he would be in touch as soon as possible.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jennings said, running splayed fingers through wisps of thin blonde hair on his head. “Why?”

“Don’t know,” replied Seth. It was a rhetorical question, of course. Jennings didn’t expect Seth to know.

“Oh, Lieutenant Jennings?”

“Yes?”

“For some reason Doug didn’t want me to call you at the station. He said to use your cell phone number. Doesn’t that seem a little odd?”

“Yes, it does, Seth.”

“I tried calling a couple of times but got your answering service so I decided to call you at the station. I hope that’s all right.”

Jennings reached in his jacket and retrieved his cell phone, looked at the dial. He pushed the button and nothing happened. Dead battery. He could never remember to keep the damned thing plugged in. “Shit,” Jennings cursed.

“Lieutenant Jennings?”

“Oh, sorry, Seth, yes, I’m sure it’s okay. Listen, do you have any idea where Doug would go?”

“No, but there is one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, when he called there was this steady background noise that sounded, well . . . it sounded like jet engines, like those on a plane.”

“Thanks, Seth,” Jennings said. “If you should hear from Doug again please tell him to call me.”

“I will, Lieutenant Jennings.”

“And Seth.”

“Yeah?”

“You haven’t talked to anyone else about this, have you?”

“No, just you, Lieutenant.”

“Good. Can I trust you to keep this conversation under your hat?”

“Absolutely.”

“Don’t even talk to another police agency.”

“Why not, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know. Just a feeling it might not be safe.”

“Sure, Lieutenant.”

“Good. Well thanks for everything.  Bye now.”

As Jennings hung up he thought he heard a strange metallic echo on the line, as if someone had been eavesdropping. He stared at the phone in his hand. What the hell? Suspicious, he hung the phone up and rifled through his desk drawer until he found a spare cell phone battery, installed it, turned the phone on and listened to his messages. There were two messages from Seth Baxter but none from Doug. Why the hell hadn’t Doug called him? He used his cell phone to call the airport. He discovered that a corporate jet had landed at eight that morning and had picked up two passengers, a man and a woman. The Jet was registered to an offshore company by the name of De Roché Barbados LTD. Jennings had never heard of the company but of course it was De Roché’s company, no question about it. He left his office and strode out into the reception area, asked Rosemary, his secretary, to use the internet instead of the telephone to find out more about De Roché Barbados LTD. She looked at him oddly but did as he asked.

He had no sooner sat back down at his desk when the phone rang again. Jennings grabbed it up, his nerves tense.

“This is Jennings. How can I help you?”

“Rick, this is Special agent Frank Spencer with the FBI. You remember we worked on a case together about ten years ago up in your territory? That family that was . . . killed? They had a little girl but she was never found.”

Suddenly Jennings was on guard. “Yeah, sure I remember. How are you, Spencer?”

“Not so good, Rick.”

“No? What’s up?”

“I remember there was a kid about eighteen or nineteen years old, a friend of yours who claimed to have seen the whole thing in some sort of dream or trance or something. He said that the parents had been killed by this dark thing he couldn’t describe and that the little girl had been taken by it. Kid had the name of some famous general, as I recall. Let me see . . .”

“Douglas McArthur,” Jennings replied with a sigh of discontent. “But it’s spelled differently than the general’s name.” Jennings suddenly and instinctively knew that he was being baited. The feds were involved and of course Spencer was all over it. But why was he being so coy? Why were they all being so fucking coy?

“What do you want, Spencer?”

“Well, since you asked, I was wondering if I might get your help on a case.”

“What case?”

“Hasn’t made the news yet. Listen, for right now this is just between you and me. That okay with you?”

“Sure.”

“Last night three members of a family were murdered in their home in Exeter New Hampshire. We’re trying to keep a lid on it for as long as possible.”

Jennings sat puzzled, breathing into the phone. “Little out of my jurisdiction, don’t you think?”

“Doesn’t matter. I can get a waiver.”

“I don’t understand. What do you want from me?”

“Well. It’s just that . . . you’ve got experience with this sort of thing.”

“I’m still not following you, Spencer.”

“That guy we just talked about, Douglas McArthur, he still live around there?”

“Now wait a minute, Spencer. That was a long time ago. He was just a kid. He doesn’t play that game any more.”

“I know you’ve never believed he was the one doing those things, Rick. Christ, neither did I. You’re right, he was just a kid. But he saw things, horrific things, incredible things. And they all came true. How do you rationalize that?”

“I gave up trying a long time ago.”

“Maybe you’d better start thinking about it again.”

Jennings temper flared. “All right, Spencer,” he said. “Get to the fucking point. What’s this about?”

“I think you should see these . . . bodies, Jennings.”

It was a long moment before Jennings replied.

“Why?”

“They look just like that family ten years ago did. And the ones before that. We think the same . . . phenomenon killed them.”

“After all this time? Jesus Christ—”

“Something else.”

“What?”

“He left his signature.”

“Shit.” Jennings almost stopped breathing. “The same—”

“Exactly, but this time he left a little bonus.”

“A bonus? What kind of bonus?”

“A symbol of some kind. I won’t try to describe it on the phone; you’ll have to see for yourself.”

“It’ll take me about an hour and a half to drive down there.”

“It can’t wait,” Spencer said. “I took the liberty of sending a chopper. It’ll be landing at the Portland Airport in about ten minutes. You’d better hustle.”

Jennings told Rosemary he’d be out for the remainder of the day and left the office.