Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (22 page)

DINNER WAS READY WHEN I GOT TO RITA'S HOUSE.
CONSIDERING what I had gone through and what I was thinking about it, you might
have thought that I would never eat again. But as I walked in the front door I
was assaulted by the aroma; Rita had made roast pork, broccoli, and rice and
beans, and there are very few things in this world that compare to Rita's roast
pork. And so it was a somewhat mollified Dexter who finally pushed the plate
away and rose from the table. And in truth, the rest of the evening was mildly
soothing as well. I played kick the can with Cody and Astor and the other
neighborhood children until it was bedtime, and then Rita and I sat on the
couch and watched a show about a grumpy doctor before turning in for the night.

Normality wasn't all bad, not with Rita's roast pork
in it, and Cody and Astor to keep me interested. Perhaps I could live
vicariously through them, like an old baseball player who becomes a coach when
his playing days are over. They had so much to learn, and in teaching them I
could relive my fading days of glory. Sad, yes, but it was at least a small
compensation.

And as I drifted off to sleep, in spite of the fact
that I really do know better, I caught myself thinking that maybe things
weren't that bad after all.

That foolish notion lasted until midnight, when I woke up to see Cody
standing at the foot of the bed. “Somebody's outside,” he said.

“All right,” I said, feeling half asleep and
not at all curious about why he needed to tell me that.

“They want in,” he said.

I sat up. “Where?” I said.

Cody turned and headed into the hallway and I
followed. I was half convinced that he had simply had a bad dream, but after
all, this was Miami and these things have been known to happen, although
certainly seldom more than five or six hundred times on any given night.

Cody led me to the door to the backyard. About ten feet from the door
he stopped dead, and I stopped with him.

“There,” Cody said softly.

There indeed. It was not a bad dream, or at least not
the kind you need to be asleep to have.

The doorknob was moving, wiggling as someone on the
outside tried to turn it.

“Wake up your mom,” I whispered to Cody. “Tell her to
call 9-1-1.” He looked up at me as if he was disappointed that I wasn't
going to charge out the door with a hand grenade and take care of things
myself, but then he turned and walked back down the hall toward the bedroom.

I approached the door,
quietly and cautiously. On the wall beside it was a switch that turned on a

floodlight which illuminated the backyard. As I reached for the switch,
the doorknob stopped turning. I turned the light on anyway.

Immediately, as if the switch had caused it to happen,
something began to thump on the front door. I turned and ran for the front of
the house-and halfway there Rita stepped into the hall and crashed into me.
“Dexter,” she said. “What-Cody said-”

“Call the cops,” I told her. “Someone is trying to break
in.” I looked behind her at Cody. “Get your sister and all of you get
into the bathroom. Lock the door.” “But who would-we're not-”
Rita said. “Go,” I told her, and pushed past her to the front door.
Once again I flipped on the outside light, and once again the sound stopped
immediately.

Only to start up again down the hall, apparently on
the kitchen window. And naturally enough when I ran into the kitchen the sound
had already stopped, even before I turned on the overhead light.

I slowly approached the
window over the sink and carefully peeked out. Nothing. Just the night and the
hedge and the neighbor's house and nothing else whatsoever. I straightened up
and stood there for a moment, waiting for the noise to start up again at some
other

corner of the house. It didn't. I realized I was holding my breath, and
I let it out. Whatever it was, it had stopped. It was gone. I unclenched my
fists and took a deep breath.

And then Rita screamed. I
turned around fast enough to twist my ankle, but still hobbled for the bathroom
as quickly as I could. The door was locked, but from inside I could hear
something scrabbling at the window. Rita shouted, “Go away!”

“Open the door,” I
said, and a moment later Astor opened it wide. “It's at the window,”
she said, rather calmly I thought. Rita was standing in the middle of the
bathroom with her clenched fists raised to her mouth. Cody stood

in front of her protectively holding the toilet
plunger, and they were both staring at the window. “Rita,” I said.
She turned to me with her eyes wide and filled with fear. “But what do
they want?” she demanded, as if

she thought I could tell her. And perhaps I could
have, in the ordinary course of things-“ordinary” being defined as the
entire previous portion of my life, when I had my Passenger to keep me company
and whisper terrible secrets. But as it was, I only knew they wanted in and I
did not know why.

I also did not know what they wanted, but it didn't
seem quite as important at the moment as the fact that they obviously wanted
something and thought we had it. “Come on,” I said. “Everybody
out of here.” Rita turned to look at me, but Cody stood his ground. “Move,”
I said, and Astor took Rita by the hand and hurried through the door. I put a
hand on Cody's shoulder and pushed him after his mother, gently prying the
plunger from his hands, and then I turned to face the window.

The noise continued, a hard scratching that sounded like someone was
trying to claw through the glass. Without any real conscious thought I stepped
forward and whacked the window with the rubber head of the toilet plunger.

The sound stopped.

For a long moment there was no sound except for my breathing, which I
realized was somewhat fast and ragged. And then, not too far away, I heard a
police siren cutting through the silence. I backed out of the bathroom,
watching the window.

Rita sat on the bed with Cody on one side of her and Astor on the
other. The children seemed quite calm, but Rita was clearly on the edge of
hysteria. “It's all right,” I said. “The cops are almost
here.”

“Will it be Sergeant Debbie?” Astor asked me, and she added
hopefully, “Do you think she'll shoot somebody?”

“Sergeant Debbie is in bed, asleep,” I said.
The siren was near now, and with a squeal of tires it came to a stop in front
of our house and wound its way down through the scale to a grumbling halt.
“They're here,” I told them, and Rita lunged up off the bed and grabbed
the children by the hand.

The three of them followed me out of the bedroom, and
by the time we got to the front door there was already a knock sounding on the
wood, polite but firm. Still, life teaches us caution, so I called out,
“Who is it?”

“This is the police,” a stern masculine voice said. “We
have a report of a possible break-in.” It sounded authentic, but just to
be sure, I left the chain on as I opened the door and looked out. Sure enough,
there were two uniformed cops standing there, one looking at the door and one
turned away, looking out into the yard and the street.

I closed the door, took the chain off, and reopened it. “Come in,
Officer,” I said. His name tag said Ramirez, and I realized I knew him slightly.
But he made no move to enter the house; he simply stared down at my hand.

“What kind of emergency is this, chief?” he said, nodding at
my hand. I looked and realized I was still holding the toilet plunger.

“Oh,” I said. I put the plunger behind the
door in the umbrella stand. “Sorry. That was for self-defense.”

“Uh-huh,” Ramirez said. “Guess it would depend what the
other guy had.” He stepped forward into the house, calling over his
shoulder to his partner, “Take a look around the yard, Williams.”

“Yo,” said Williams, a wiry black man of
about forty. He walked down into the yard and disappeared around the corner of
the house.

Ramirez stood in the center of the room, looking at
Rita and the kids. “So, what's the story here?” he asked, and before
I could answer he squinted at me. “I know you from somewhere?” he
said. “Dexter Morgan,” I said. “I work in forensics.”
“Right,” he said. “So what happened here, Dexter?” I told
him.

THE COPS STAYED WITH US FOR ABOUT FORTY MINUTES. They looked around the
yard and the surrounding neighborhood and found nothing, which did not seem to
surprise them, and which truthfully was not a great shock to me, either. When
they were done looking Rita made them coffee and fed them some oatmeal cookies
she had made.

Ramirez was certain it had been a couple of kids
trying to get some kind of reaction from us, and if so they had certainly
succeeded. Williams tried very hard to be reassuring, telling us it was just a
prank and now it was over, and as they were leaving Ramirez added that they
would drive by a few times the rest of the night. But even with these soothing
words still fresh, Rita sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee for the rest of
the night, unable to get back to sleep. For my part, I tossed and turned for
more than three minutes before I drifted back to slumberland.

And as I flew down the long black mountain into sleep,
the music started up again. And there was a great feeling of gladness and then
heat on my face…

And somehow I was in the hallway, with Rita shaking me and calling my
name. “Dexter, wake up,” she said. “Dexter.”

“What happened?” I said.

“You were sleepwalking,” she said. “And
singing. Singing in your sleep.”

And so rosy-fingered dawn found both of us sitting at
the kitchen table, drinking coffee. When the alarm finally went off in the
bedroom, she got up to turn it off and came back and looked at me. I looked
back, but there didn't seem to be anything to say, and then Cody and Astor came
into the kitchen, and there was nothing more we could do except stumble through
the morning routine and head for work, automatically pretending that everything
was exactly the way it should be.

But of course it wasn't. Someone was trying to get into
my head, and they were succeeding far too well. And now they were trying to get
into my house, and I didn't even know who it was, or what they wanted. I had to
assume that somehow it was all connected to Moloch, and the absence of my
Presence.

The bottom line was that somebody was trying to do something to me, and
they were getting closer and closer to doing it.

I found myself unwilling to consider the idea that a
real live ancient god was trying to kill me. To begin with, they don't exist.
And even if they did, why would one bother with me? Clearly some human being
was using the whole Moloch thing as a costume in order to feel more powerful
and important, and to make his victims believe he had special magical powers.

Like the ability to invade my sleep and make me hear music, for
instance? A human predator couldn't do that. And it couldn't scare away the
Dark Passenger, either.

The only possible answers were impossible. Maybe it was just the
crippling fatigue, but I couldn't think of any others that weren't.

When I arrived at work that morning, I had no chance to think of
anything better, because there was an immediate call to a double homicide in a
quiet marijuana house in the Grove. Two teenagers had been tied up, cut up, and
then shot several times each, just for good measure. And although I am certain
that I should have considered this a terrible thing, I was actually very
grateful for the opportunity to view dead bodies that were not cooked and beheaded.
It made things seem normal, even peaceful, for just a little while. I sprayed
my luminol hither and yon, almost happy to perform a task that made the hideous
music recede for a little while.

But it also gave me time to ponder, and this I did. I saw scenes like
this every day, and nine times out of ten the killers said things like “I
just snapped” or “By the time I knew what I was doing it was too
late.” All grand excuses, and it had seemed a bit amusing to me, since I
always knew what I was doing, which was why I did it.

And at last a thought wandered in-I had found myself
unable to do anything at all to Starzak without my Dark Passenger. This meant
that my talent was in the Passenger, not in me by myself. Which could mean that
all these others who “snapped” were temporarily playing host to
something similar, couldn't it?

Until now, mine had never left me; it was permanently at home with me,
not wandering around in the streets hitchhiking with the first bad-tempered
wretch that wandered by.

All right, put that aside for the time being. Let's just assume that
some Passengers wander and some of them nest. Could this account for what
Halpern had described as a dream? Could something go into him, make him kill
two girls, and then take him home and tuck him into bed before leaving?

I didn't know. But I did know that if that idea held
water, I was in a lot deeper than I had imagined.

By the time I got back to my office it was past time
for lunch, and there was a call waiting from Rita to remind me that I had a
2:30 appointment with her minister. And by “minister” I don't mean
the kind with a position in the cabinet of a foreign government. As unlikely as
it seems, I mean the kind of minister you will find in a church, if you are
ever compelled to visit one for some reason. For my part, I have always assumed
that if there is any kind of God at all He would never let something like me
flourish. And if I am wrong, the altar might crack and fall if I went inside a
church.

But my sensible avoidance of religious buildings was
at an end now, since Rita wanted her very own minister to perform our wedding
ceremony, and apparently he needed to check my human credentials before
agreeing to the assignment. Of course, he hadn't done a very good job of it the
first time, since Rita's first husband had been a crack addict who regularly
beat her, and the reverend had somehow failed to detect that. And if the
minister had missed something that obvious before, the odds of him doing better
with me were not very good at all.

Still, Rita set great store
by the man, so away we went to an ancient coral-rock church on an overgrown lot
in the Grove, only half a mile from the homicide scene I had worked that
morning. Rita had been confirmed there, she told me, and had known the minister
for a very long time. Apparently that was important, and I supposed it should
be, considering what I knew about several men of God who had come to my
attention through my hobby. My former hobby, that is.

Reverend Gilles was waiting for us in his office-or is it called a
cloister, or a retreat, or something like that? Rectory always sounded to me
like a place where you would find a proctologist. Perhaps it was a sacristy-I
admit that I am not up on my terminology here. My foster mother, Doris, did try
to get me to church when I was young, but after a couple of regrettable
incidents it became apparent that it wasn't going to stick, and Harry
intervened.

The reverend's study was lined with books that had
improbable titles offering no doubt very sound advice on dealing with things
God would really prefer you to avoid. There were also a few that offered
insight into a woman's soul, although it did not specify which woman, and
information on how to make Christ work for you, which I hoped did not mean at
minimum wage. There was even one on Christian chemistry, which seemed to me to
be stretching the point, unless it gave a recipe for the old water-intowine
trick.

Much more interesting was a book with Gothic script on the binding. I
turned my head to read the title; mere curiosity, but when I read it I felt a
jolt go through me as if my esophagus had suddenly filled with ice.

Demonic Possession: Fact or Fancy? it said, and as I
read the title I distinctly heard the far-off sound of a nickel dropping.

It would be very easy for an outside observer to shake
his head and say, Yes, obviously, Dexter is a dull boy if he has never thought
of that. But the truth is, I had not. Demon has so many negative connotations,
doesn't it? And as long as the Presence was present, there seemed no need to
define it in those arcane terms. It was only now that it was gone that I
required some explanation. And why not this one? It was a bit old-fashioned,
but its very hoariness seemed to argue that there might be something to it,
some connection that went back to the nonsense with Solomon and Moloch and all
the way up to what was happening to me today.

Was the Dark Passenger really a demon? And did the Passenger's absence
mean it had been cast out? If so, by what? Something overwhelmingly good? I
could not recall encountering anything like that in the last, oh, lifetime or
so. Just the opposite, in fact.

But could something very very bad cast out a demon? I mean, what could
be worse than a demon? Perhaps Moloch? Or could a demon cast itself out for
some reason?

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that at least I had some
good questions now, but I didn't feel terribly comforted, and my thoughts were
interrupted when the door opened and the Right Reverend Gilles breezed in,
beaming and muttering, “Well, well.”

The reverend was about fifty and seemed well fed, so I suppose the
tithing business was working. He came right to us and gave Rita a hug and a
peck on the cheek, before turning to offer me a hearty masculine handshake.

“Well,” he said, smiling cautiously at me.
“So you're Dexter.”

“I suppose I am,” I said. “I just
couldn't help it.”

He nodded, almost as if I had made sense. “Sit
down, please, relax,” he said, and he moved around behind the desk and sat
in a large swivel chair.

I took him at his word and
leaned back in the red leather chair opposite his desk, but Rita perched

nervously on the edge of her
identical seat. “Rita,” he said, and he smiled again. “Well,
well. So you're ready to try again, are you?” “Yes, I-that's just-I
mean, I think so,” Rita said, blushing furiously. “I mean, yes.”
She looked at me with

a bright red smile and said,
“Yes, I'm ready.”

“Good, good,” he
said, and he switched his expression of fond concern over to me. "And you,
Dexter. I

would really like to know a
little bit about you."

“Well, to begin with,
I'm a murder suspect,” I said modestly.

“Dexter,” Rita
said, and impossibly turned even redder.

“The police think you
killed somebody?” Reverend Gilles asked.

“Oh, they don't all
think that,” I said. “Just my sister.”

“Dexter works in
forensics,” Rita blurted out. "His sister is a detective. He just-he
was only kidding about

the other part.“ Once
again he nodded at me. ”A sense of humor is a big help in any
relationship,“ he said. He paused for a moment, looked very thoughtful and
even more sincere, and then said, ”How do you feel

about Rita's children?"

“Oh, Cody and Astor
adore Dexter,” Rita said, and she looked very happy that we were no longer
talking about my status as a wanted man. “But how does Dexter feel about
them?” he insisted gently. “I like them,” I said. Reverend
Gilles nodded and said, "Good. Very good. Sometimes children can be a
burden. Especially

when they're not
yours.“ ”Cody and Astor are very good at being a burden,“ I
said. ”But I don't really mind.“ ”They're going to need a lot of
mentoring,“ he said, ”after all they went through.“ ”Oh, I
mentor them," I said, although I thought it was probably a good idea not
to be too specific, so I just

added, “They're very
eager to be mentored.” “All right,” he said. “So we'll see
those kids here at Sunday school, right?” It seemed to me to be a
bald-faced attempt to blackmail us into providing future recruits to fill his
collection basket, but Rita nodded

eagerly, so I went along
with it. Besides, I was reasonably sure that whatever anyone might say, Cody
and Astor would find their spiritual comfort somewhere else. “Now, the two
of you,” he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing the back of one
hand with the palm

of the other. “A
relationship in today's world needs a strong foundation in faith,” he
said, looking at me

expectantly. “Dexter? How about it?”

Well, there it was. You have to believe that sooner or
later a minister will find a way to twist things around so they fall into his area.
I don't know if it's worse to lie to a minister than to anyone else, but I did
want to get this interview over quickly and painlessly, and could that possibly
happen if I told the truth? Suppose I did and said something like, Yes, I have
a great deal of faith, Reverend-in human greed and stupidity, and in the
sweetness of sharp steel on a moonlit night. I have faith in the dark unseen,
the cold chuckle from the shadows inside, the absolute clarity of the knife.
Oh, yes, I have faith, Reverend, and beyond faith-I have certainty, because I
have seen the bleak bottom line and I know it is real; it's where I live.

But really, that was hardly calculated to reassure the
man, and I surely didn't need to worry about going to hell for telling a lie to
a minister. If there actually is a hell, I already have a front-row seat. So I
merely said, “Faith is very important,” and he seemed to be happy
with that.

“Great, okay,” he said, and he glanced covertly at his watch.
“Dexter, do you have any questions about our church?”

A fair question, perhaps, but it took me by surprise,
since I had been thinking of this interview as my time for answering questions,
not asking them. I was perfectly ready to be evasive for at least another
hour-but really, what was there to ask about? Did they use grape juice or wine?
Was the collection basket metal or wood? Was dancing a sin? I was just not
prepared. And yet he seemed like he was truly interested in knowing. So I
smiled reassuringly back at Reverend Gilles and said, “Actually, I'd love
to know what you think about demonic possession.”

“Dexter!” Rita gulped with a nervous smile.
“That's not-You can't really-”