Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (23 page)

Reverend Gilles raised a hand. “It's all right,
Rita,” he said. “I think I know where Dexter's coming from.” He
leaned back in the chair and nodded, favoring me with a pleasant and knowing
smile. “Been quite a while since you've been to church, Dexter?”

“Well, actually, it has,” I said.

“I think you'll find that the new church is quite
a good fit for the modern world. The central truth of God's love doesn't
change,” he said. “But sometimes our understanding of it can.”
And then he actually winked at me. “I think we can agree that demons are
for Halloween, not for Sunday service.”

Well, it was nice to have an answer, even if it wasn't the one I was
looking for. I hadn't really expected Reverend Gilles to pull out a grimoire
and cast a spell, but I admit it was a little disappointing. “All right,
then,” I said.

“Any other questions?” he asked me with a
very satisfied smile. “About our church, or anything about the
ceremony?”

“Why, no,” I said. “It seems very
straightforward.”

“We like to think so,” he said. “As
long as we put Christ first, everything else falls into place.”

“Amen,” I said
brightly. Rita gave me a bit of a look, but the reverend seemed to accept it.

“All right, then,” he said, and he stood up and held out his
hand, “June twenty-fourth it is.” I stood up, too, and shook his
hand. “But I expect to see you here before then,” he said. “We
have a great contemporary service at ten o'clock every Sunday.” He winked
and gave my hand an extra-manly squeeze. “Gets you home in time for the
football game.”

“That's terrific,” I said, thinking how nice
it is when a business anticipates the needs of its customers.

He dropped my hand and grabbed Rita, wrapping her up
in a full embrace. “Rita,” he said. “I'm so happy for you.”

“Thank you,” Rita sobbed into his shoulder. She leaned
against him for a moment longer and snuffled, and then stood upright again,
rubbing her nose and looking at me. “Thank you, Dexter,” she said.
For what I don't know, but it's always nice to be included.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN QUITE A WHILE I WAS ACTUALLY
anxious to get back to my cubicle. Not because I was pining for blood
spatter-but because of the idea that had descended on me in Reverend Gilles's
study. Demonic possession. It had a certain ring to it. I had never really felt
possessed, although Rita was certainly staking her claim. But it was at least
some kind of explanation with a degree of history attached, and I was very
eager to pursue it.

First I checked my answering machine and e-mail: no messages except a routine
departmental memo on cleaning up the coffee area. No abject apology from Debs,
either. I made a few careful calls and found that she was out trying to round
up Kurt Wagner, which was a relief, since it meant she wasn't following me.

Problem solved and conscience clear, I began looking
into the question of demonic possession. Once again, good old King Solomon
figured prominently. He had apparently been quite cozy with a number of demons,
most of whom had improbable names with several z's in them. And he had ordered
them about like indentured servants, forcing them to fetch and tote and build
his great temple, which was a bit of a shock, since I had always heard that the
temple was a good thing, and surely there must have been some kind of law in
place about demon labor. I mean, if we get so upset about illegal immigrants
picking the oranges, shouldn't all those God-fearing patriarchs have had some
kind of ordinance against demons?

But there it was in black and white. King Solomon had consorted with
them quite comfortably, as their boss. They didn't like being ordered around,
of course, but they put up with it from him. And that raised the interesting
thought that perhaps someone else was able to control them, and was trying to
do so with the Dark Passenger, who had therefore fled from involuntary
servitude. I paused and thought about that.

The biggest problem with that theory was that it did
not fit in with the overwhelming sense of mortal danger that had flooded
through me from the very first, even when the Passenger had still been on
board. I can understand reluctance to do unwanted work as easily as the next
guy, but that had nothing to do with the lethal dread that this had raised in
me.

Did that mean the Passenger was not a demon? Did it mean that what was
happening to me was mere psychosis? A totally imagined paranoid fantasy of
pursuing bloodlust and approaching horror?

And yet, every culture in
the world throughout history seemed to believe that there was something to the
whole idea of possession. I just couldn't get it to connect in any way to my
problem. I felt like I was onto something, but no great thought emerged.

Suddenly it was five thirty, and I was more than usually anxious to
flee from the office and head for the dubious sanctuary of home.

image

The next afternoon I was in my cubicle, typing up a report on a very
dull multiple killing. Even Miami gets ordinary murders, and this was one of
them-or three and a half of them, to be precise, since there were three bodies
in the morgue and one more in intensive care at Jackson Memorial. It was a
simple drive-by shooting in one of the few areas of the city with low property
values. There was really no point in spending a great deal of my time on it,
since there were plenty of witnesses and they all agreed that someone named
“Motherfucker” had done the deed.

Still, forms must be observed, and I had spent half a
day on the scene making sure that no one had jumped out of a doorway and hacked
the victims with a hedge clipper while they were being shot from a passing car.
I was trying to think of an interesting way to say that the blood spatter was
consistent with gunfire from a moving source, but the boredom of it all was
making my eyes cross, and as I stared vacantly at the screen, I felt a ringing
rise in my ears and change to the clang of gongs and the night music came
again, and the plain white of the word-processing page seemed suddenly to wash
over with awful wet blood and spill out across me, flood the office, and fill
the entire visible world. I jumped out of my chair and blinked a few times
until it went away, but it left me shaking and wondering what had just
happened.

It was starting to come at me in the full light of day, even sitting at
my desk at police headquarters, and I did not like that at all. Either it was
getting stronger and closer, or I was going right off the deep end and into
complete madness. Schizophrenics heard voices-did they ever hear music, too?
And did the Dark Passenger qualify as a voice? Had I been completely insane all
this time and was just now coming to some kind of crazy final episode in the
artificial sanity of Dubious Dexter?

I didn't think that was possible. Harry had gotten me
squared away, made sure that I fit in just right-Harry would have known if I
was crazy, and he had told me I was not. Harry was never wrong. So it was
settled and I was fine, just fine, thank you.

So why did I hear that music? Why was my hand shaking?
And why did I need to cling to a ghost to keep from sitting on the floor and
flipping my lips with an index finger?

Clearly no one else in the building heard anything-it
was just me. Otherwise the halls would be filled with people either dancing or
screaming. No, fear had crawled into my life, slinking after me faster than I
could run, filling the huge empty space inside me where the Passenger had once
snuggled down.

I had nothing to go on; I needed some outside
information if I hoped to understand this. Plenty of sources believed that
demons were real-Miami was filled with people who worked hard to keep them away
every day of their lives. And even though the babalao had said he wanted
nothing to do with this whole thing, and had walked away from it as rapidly as
he could, he had seemed to know what it was. I was fairly sure that Santeria
allowed for possession. But never mind: Miami is a wonderful and diverse city,
and I would certainly find some other place to ask the question and get an
entirely different answer-perhaps even the one I was looking for. I left my
cubicle and headed for the parking lot.

The Tree of Life was on the
edge of Liberty City, an area of Miami that is not a good place for tourists
from Iowa to visit late at night. This particular corner had been taken over by
Haitian immigrants, and many of the buildings had been painted in several
bright colors, as if there was not enough of one color to

go around. On some of the buildings there were murals
depicting Haitian country life. Roosters seemed to be prominent, and goats.

Painted on the outside wall of the Tree of Life there was a large tree,
appropriately enough, and under it was an elongated image of two men pounding
on some tall drums. I parked right in front of the shop and went in through a
screen door that rang a small bell and then banged behind me. In the back,
behind a curtain of hanging beads, a woman's voice called out something in
Creole, and I stood by the glass counter and waited. The store was lined with
shelves that contained numerous jars filled with mysterious things, liquid,
solid, and uncertain. One or two of them seemed to be holding things that might
once have been alive.

After a moment, a woman pushed through the beads and came into the
front of the store. She appeared to be about forty and reed thin, with high cheekbones
and a complexion like sun-bleached mahogany. She wore a flowing red-and-yellow
dress, and her head was wrapped in a matching turban. “Ah,” she said
with a thick Creole accent. She looked me over with a very doubtful expression
and shook her head slightly. “How I can help you, sir?”

“Ah, well,” I said, and I more or less stumbled to a halt.
How, after all, did one begin? I couldn't really say that I thought I used to
be possessed and wanted to get the demon back-the poor woman might throw
chicken blood at me.

“Sir?” she prompted impatiently.

“I was wondering,” I said, which was true
enough, “do you have any books on possession by demons? Erin
English?”

She pursed her lips with great disapproval and shook her head
vigorously. “It is not the demons,” she said. “Why do you ask
this-are you a reporter?”

“No,” I said. “I'm just, um,
interested. Curious.”

“Curious about the voudoun?” she said.

“Just the possession part,” I said.

“Huh,” she said, and if possible her
disapproval grew even more. “Why?”

Someone very clever must already have said that when all else fails,
try the truth. It sounded so good that I was sure I was not the first to think
of it, and it seemed like the only thing I had left. I gave it a shot.

“I think,” I said, “I mean, I'm not
sure. I think I may have been possessed. A while ago.”

“Ha,” she said. She looked at me long and hard, and then
shrugged. “May be,” she said at last. “Why do you say so?”

“I just, um…I had the feeling, you know. That
something else was, ah. Inside me? Watching?”

She spat on the floor, a very strange gesture from
such an elegant woman, and shook her head. “All you blancs,” she
said. “You steal us and bring us here, take everythin' from us. And then
when we make somethin' from the nothin' you give us, now you want to be part of
that, too. Ha.” She shook her finger at

me, for all the world like a second-grade teacher with
a bad student. “You listen, blanc. If the spirit enters you, you would
know. This is not somethin' like in a movie. It is a very great blessing,
and,” she said with a mean smirk, “it does not happen to the
blancs.”

“Well, actually,” I said.

“Non,” she said. “Unless you are
willing, unless you ask for the blessing, it does not come.”

“But I am willing,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “It never come to you. You waste my
time.” And she turned around and walked through the bead curtains to the
back of the store.

I saw no point in waiting around for her to have a change
of heart. It didn't seem likely to happen-and it didn't seem likely that voodoo
had any answers about the Dark Passenger. She had said it only comes when
called, and it was a blessing. At least that was a different answer, although I
did not remember ever calling the Dark Passenger to come in-it was just always
there. But to be absolutely sure, I paused at the curb outside the store and
closed my eyes. Please come back in, I said.

Nothing happened. I got in my car and went back to
work.

image

What an interesting choice, the Watcher thought. Voodoo. There was a
certain logic to the idea, of course, he could not deny that. But what was
really interesting was what it showed about the other. He was moving in the
right direction-and he was very close.

And when his next little clue turned up, the other would be that much
closer. The boy had been so panicky, he had almost wriggled away. But he had
not; he had been very helpful and he was now on his way to his dark reward.

Just like the other was.

I HAD BARELY SETTLED
BACK INTO MY CHAIR WHEN DEBORAH came into my little cubicle and sat in the folding chair across from my desk.
“Kurt Wagner is missing,” she said. I waited for more, but nothing
came, so I just nodded. “I accept your apology,” I said.
“Nobody's seen him since Saturday afternoon,” she said. "His
roommate says he came in acting all

freaked out, but wouldn't say anything. He just changed his shoes, and
left, and that's it.“ She hesitated, and then added, ”He left his
backpack."

I admit I perked up a
little at that. “What was in it?” I asked. “Traces of
blood,” she said, as if she was admitting she had taken the last cookie.
“It matches Tammy Connor's.”

“Well then,” I
said. It didn't seem right to say anything about the fact that she'd had
somebody else do the

blood work. “That's a pretty good clue.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It's him. It has to be him. So he did Tammy,
took the head in his backpack and did Manny Borque.”

“It does look like that,” I said.
“That's a shame-I was just getting used to the idea that I was guilty.”

“It makes no fucking sense,” Deborah
complained. “The kid's a good student, on the swimming team, good
family-all of that.” “He was such a nice guy,” I said. “I
can't believe he did all those horrible things.” “All right,”
Deborah said. "I know it, goddamn it. Total cliché. But what the hell-the
guy kills his own

girlfriend, sure. Maybe even her roommate, because she saw it. But why
everybody else? And all that crap with burning them, and the bulls' heads, what
is it, Mollusk?"

“Moloch,” I said.
“Mollusk is a clam.” “Whatever,” she said. “But it
makes no sense, Dex. I mean…” She looked away, and for a moment I thought
she was going to apologize after all. But I was wrong. “If it does make
sense,” she said, “it's your kind of sense. The kind of thing you
know about.” She looked back at me, but she still seemed to be
embarrassed. “That's, you know-I mean, is it, um-did it come back? Your,
uh…”

“No,” I said.
“It didn't come back.” “Well,” she said, “shit.”
“Did you put out a BOLO on Kurt Wagner?” I asked. “I know how to
do my job, Dex,” she said. "If he's in the Miami-Dade area, we'll get
him, and FDLE has

it, too. If he's in Florida,
somebody'll find him.“ ”And if he's not in Florida?" She looked
hard at me, and I saw the beginnings of the way Harry had looked before he got
sick, after so

many years as a cop: tired,
and getting used to the idea of routine defeat. "Then he'll probably get
away

with it,“ she said. ”And I'll have to arrest
you to save my job.“ ”Well, then,“ I said, trying hard for cheerfulness
in the face of overwhelming grim grayness, ”let's hope he drives a very
recognizable car."

She snorted. “It's a red Geo, one of those
mini-Jeep things.”

I closed my eyes. It was a very odd sensation, but I
felt all the blood in my body suddenly relocating to my feet. “Did you say
red?” I heard myself ask in a remarkably calm voice. There was no answer,
and I opened my eyes. Deborah was staring at me with a look of suspicion so

strong I could almost touch
it.

“What the hell is that,” she said. “One
of your voices?”

“A red Geo followed me home the other night,” I said.
“And then somebody tried to break into my house.”

“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when
the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”

“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to
me again,” I said.

Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at
her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.

“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.

“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the
apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it's red. But shit,” she said, still
looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are
winning.”

I didn't like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery
remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song
back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty. “Well,” I said at last,
“if the bad guys really are winning, at least there's plenty of work for
you.”

She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile.
“Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two
kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening
slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture. “Hooray
for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.

image

From the very beginning it was an ideal partnership. The new things had
self-awareness, and that made manipulating them much easier-and much more
rewarding for IT. They killed one another much more readily, too, and IT did
not have to wait long at all for a new host-nor to try again to reproduce. IT
eagerly drove IT's host to a killing, and IT waited, longing to feel the
strange and wonderful swelling.

But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a
tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing
offspring.

IT was puzzled. Why didn't reproduction work this
time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT's search
for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT experimented.
And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took
quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but
each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and
fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.

The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either
from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state. The
victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind,
their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.

Then there was fire-fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It
seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of
spectacular energy.

And finally, the whole
thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much

stronger, especially in
the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine. Fire,
trance, young victims. A simple formula. IT began to push the new hosts to
create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts

were surprisingly willing
to go along with IT.