Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (28 page)

"Sarah is sleeping, but she's just fine, John."

"And Amy?"

"Amy is also fine."

He nodded, flexing his hands against the thick arm of a wooden chair, doing the same with his leg muscles, unable to move more than his fingers and toes. He was tightly bound to the arms and legs of the chair, and there were bindings around his chest, as well. They were taking no chances.

"Could I have a little water, please?"

Off to his right he heard someone stir. A chair leg scraped against a stone floor and a second later a straw was placed between his chapped lips. He sucked greedily until after only a few sips it was pulled away.

He swallowed, worked his jaw back and forth, tried to make his mind work against the drugs. "I met some of your friends in a men's room in the Phnom Penh airport," he said, his voice coming louder and stronger.

"That was inelegant on our part," Jessica said. "For what it's worth, I was against trying it."

"I seem to have been a terrible inconvenience."

"You have been a challenging opponent, John," Jessica Lodge said. "Actually, I have to congratulate you. A year or two ago I thought we were going to be able to check you off our list. After your wife's death, you seemed to be on your way to a life of alcoholism, and I hoped you would just slide quietly into ineptitude."

"Sorry to disappoint." He had been blinking his eyes slowly to try and clear them, and this time when he opened them he found he could actually make the out the room and the shape of the table and the faces. The room was elaborate, with ornate moldings along the ceiling, oil paintings on the walls, but windowless. It brought back terrible memories of the room in the catacombs beneath Salem, and for a moment he could feel the tickle of fear like a small fire starting deep in his belly.

The table was in the form of a hexagram, but instead of being pointed, each arm of the hexagram had a place for a person to sit. John occupied one of those spots, and he could see that each of the other points was also occupied. He looked first to his left and then right, seeing gray hair and erect carriage. They were strangers, but their tailored clothing, rich jewelry, and chiseled features identified them as individuals of wealth and power.

John blinked to clear his vision a bit more and finally moved his gaze directly across the table where he knew Jessica Lodge was sitting. He saw her sharing one of the points with a tall man with a full head of gray hair, a ramrod straight nose, strong chin, and regal bearing. Jessica's hair was carefully done, her gown appeared to be long and flowing, and a large sapphire at her throat gave her an almost queenly aura.

John looked at her and a tremor of anger replaced the fear he had felt just a moment earlier. Then he moved his eyes to Jessica's left and his breath caught in his throat. Sarah sat along one side of the point, also in a flowing gown, also with her hair up in a formal arrangement, her makeup carefully applied.

"Sarah," he said in a choked voice.

SHE TURNED TO LOOK AT HIM, BUT HER GAZE
was blank, lacking recognition, as if she was in a trance or as if she was a stranger who simply looked identical to his daughter.

"Sarah," he said again, hearing the beseeching tremor in his voice. She continued to look at him without any emotion, as implacable as a robot, and he realized she must either be drugged or under some kind of trance.

"What do you want?" he asked Jessica.

"John, you've always been so terribly intuitive. I think you know what we want."

"Well, I presume from the way those two men acted in the airport that you want me dead."

Jessica smiled at him. "See, I told you that you would get it."

"If you want me dead, why even bother with this seance? Why not just kill me?"

He caught the sideways glance Jessica shared with the man who sat beside her.

"We decided to give you one last chance to join us."

John snorted a laugh. "Would you believe me if I told you I'd had a change of heart?"

Jessica smiled and shook her head. "Probably not.

John's brain was still stuck in sludge, but his gut instinct told him he needed to play for time. He didn't have a clue how it was going to help him, but he also knew he had no other option. "So that doesn't really answer my question, does it? What is the point of having me here at this table? Why don't you just shoot me and get it over?"

Again he saw several of the people around the table cast glances at each other, as if this idea represented some kind of risk to them.

He had already started to suspect that in addition to slowing his mental reactions, another aspect of the drug he had been given was to dampen his emotional reactions. After all, he knew they were very close to killing him, but he couldn't seem to summon much in the way of either fear or rage.

"Enough," Jessica said. "It is time."

The man who was sitting beside her stood up and walked around the table until he stood directly behind John. At that point Jessica leaned forward and extended her arms to either side. One by one the people around the table reached out and clasped hands. John was relieved to see they bypassed Sarah, but they linked hands with the man standing right behind his chair.

Again John felt a tremor of fear in his stomach, but nothing more. In a small corner of his brain he realized he was about to be a passive bystander at his own execution. A second later another realization dawned: it wasn't going to be just him that died. Somehow, by giving them a place to escape into, he had brought freedom to countless spirits that had been held in some kind of ongoing torment for a very long time. If he let himself die, didn't he risk returning these spirits to the agony they had just escaped?

Across the table from where he sat, Jessica Lodge released herself from the chain of hands, stood, and fetched something from a side table behind her. She returned to the table with a bowl and brought it around to each set of joined hands. Dipping her hand into the bowl, she proceeded to draw an X on each set of hands with what John knew right away had to be human blood.

When she finished going around the table and each set of hands had a large X that touched each hand equally, she did the same thing to each of her hands and joined them again with the people to either side of her. When that was finished the man who had been standing behind John began to chant.

John paid no attention to the words because right away he became aware that the light in the room seemed to dim, and then a second later he realized it wasn't the light in the room but the light in the immediate circle that had grown darker. As the man behind John continued to chant, the others at the table also began to speak the words with him, and as they did the air within the circle of hands grew even darker.

As the air around him darkened, it also seemed to thicken, and John could feel his chest begin to strain as he tried to pull air into his lungs. His brain was still too muddy to put coherent thoughts together, but he knew he should feel panic. In some very small recess of his mind a faint voice was crying out, telling him he was going to die very soon if he didn't do something. Another part of his brain was trying to put together a question: why was the Coven doing this to him? Why not just cut his wrists and let him bleed to death in yet another of their blood sacrifices? There had to be a reason they were doing it this way, didn't there?

He was so sleepy and lethargic, and it was getting so terribly hard to breathe and even harder to summon the determination to fight it. But then in the next second he felt something touch his hand and it seemed as if a light had come on. He opened his eyes and saw Rebecca Nurse holding both of his hands in hers, and on either side of Rebecca, the line of beseeching faces, young, old, man, woman, thousands and thousands and millions of them, running into the distance.

Fight!
a voice called out in his head, the tone blaringly loud and insistent. In that same instant, he began to look into the eyes of the other spirits, spirits that had been imprisoned at Auschwitz and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and he saw their hope and their fear, and he felt their pain. The face of a little girl looked up at him, and the wrinkled face of a nearly toothless old woman and a young mother holding a baby to her breast, and in that blinding instant he knew their stories as he knew his own. They exploded inside him like a bomb, and with immediate shattering revelation he knew the hopes and dreams and aspirations that had been savagely cut short; he knew their loves and their hatreds and their fears, and he knew their fear of his failure was the one thing that united each and every one of them at that moment.

Fight!
The word came again like an irresistible wall of will, and he felt Rebecca Nurse's hands squeeze his until what felt like a shot of adrenaline exploded through them and into his veins. As all of this was happening, John was aware that he hadn't moved. He realized that to anyone watching him the change was absolutely imperceptible, but his mind was starting to work again.

He focused on the first thing he needed: air. The darkness inside the linked hands of the Coven was like a plastic bag over his head. He was suffocating and the darkness all around him was intensifying and hardening, and if he didn't find a way to breathe very quickly, he was going to pass out and die. John felt like he was in a separate universe, and then he realized that perhaps he was, that he couldn't breathe because he was being pulled into an eternal prison of cold and darkness and death.

He looked into Rebecca Nurse's eyes and then into the eyes of the nearest of the millions of spirits, and he sensed something there and realized he could draw upon it if he concentrated hard enough. His lungs were on fire, his body rebelling against the lack of oxygen. The darkness continued to harden around him, becoming a shell of impenetrable onyx, and John realized that in another few seconds it would be too late. If he didn't fight back he was going to die inside a crypt of darkness.

The eyes, he thought, screaming to himself, feeling the beginning of fear and panic and welcome rage as his mind fought the drugs and managed to kick back into high gear. The eyes.

He looked at the little girl, the old woman, the young mother, he looked at the boy beside her and the man beside him and the next three men and then a group of young girls, and in each set of eyes he caught a small glint of energy and hope, a small shred of determination to fight back. In every case it was a dim light, barely perceptible, but it still existed.

He opened his eyes wide, and instead of resenting the invasion of the spirits, instead of feeling compromised and overwhelmed, he invited them into him, he asked for their light and for it to combine with his own. His body was so starved of oxygen it wanted to shut down, and he felt the darkness so hard and impenetrable now he could barely see the light in the room beyond its boundary. The light was only a foot or two away in any direction, but he was trapped in a bubble of darkness. With the last vestiges of consciousness he focused his mind on the outer light. While he knew his own life force was vastly insufficient to reach it, he felt it amplified and bolstered now by that small light that each of the millions spirits offered up to him.

His own quickly dimming light, reinforced and reflected and supercharged by the millions upon millions of tiny lights offered up by the millions upon millions of souls, became like a fist of light that forced back the darkness, that punched through and for a moment made a hole in the shell of death and entrapment.

John felt air rush through the hole, and along with it the light of the room poured in like a blinding sunrise. In that same instant he heard the voices of the Coven grow louder, their chanting increasing in urgency, the words coming faster, full of desperate emotion. For several seconds the darkness seemed to deepen and gown even harder, and the hole seemed to grow smaller.

But the oxygen had come in, and it went straight to John's brain, and he felt his own internal light intensify. As it did, the light he drew from all the other spirits seemed to grow as well, and John felt his rage build inside like something wild and uncontrollable waking from a deep slumber.

The voices might have been louder, the chanting faster, but John was now able to pull the light from deep inside. How much was his own and how much came from all the other spirits and how much was the result of that light being reflected and reinforced by the joining and yearning of all the spirits now bound together inside of him John could not have said.

He only knew that at some point there seemed to be an explosion. He heard no sound, but saw the blinding flash of light that shattered the darkness like a firebomb going off in the deepest night, and when his eyes readjusted he saw the aftermath of the explosion, the litter of bodies thrown from the table to the corners of the room, their positions so unnatural that he knew without checking for pulses that they were all dead.