Malice (24 page)

She found one almost at once, on a mahogany desk by the far wall. Above it was a picture of two men standing together—the same she’d seen in McMurphy’s basement. She lifted the receiver and began to dial. In the middle of the second ring the line died.

“It just went dead,” she said, fear curdling in her throat.

Lysander’s spirits began to sink and then suddenly his expression changed. “He could only have cut the line from outside.”

Sam looked puzzled. “So?”

“So, it means he isn’t standing behind this door. If we move quick we can sneak out before he comes back.”

“I don’t know, Lysander.”

He grabbed her hand. “Do you trust me?”

Her eyes met his. “I trust you.”

“Then let’s go.”

He flung the door open, half expecting to find a knife arching toward his head, and they fled into the hall. The house was dark and eerily silent.

They came to the kitchen and a pair of sliding doors. Lysander jiggled them and found that they were locked.

A noise like the closing of a door sounded from over by the garage. The reverend had come back inside. Then they caught sight of him, staggering in the gloom, ready to finish what he had started. The kitchen counter stretched out to divide the room in half and they crouched behind it. They could hear his footsteps drawing closer. Step, drag. Step, drag.

Sam’s heart was hammering wildly in her chest.

They could hear him as he approached, muttering under his breath.

It sounded as though he was carrying something heavy and metallic. A wood-chopping axe thudded against the floor right before them. He was going to chop down the door and then hack them to pieces, the same way he’d done to the McMurphys all those years ago.

Through the darkness they could see him clearly, standing before them. He seemed to be peering down the hallway. His labored breathing seesawing in and out. The reverend only needed to turn in their direction, and he would see them, huddled together like little piglets hiding from the big bad wolf. Sam was on the verge of a scream, but her hand found its way to her mouth just in time. All the muscles in Lysander’s body tensed.

Only after he’d disappeared did they hear him bellow. They’d forgotten to close the door behind them and now he knew they’d escaped. Lysander tugged on Sam’s hand and they straightened, their legs cracking at the joints. They sprinted for the back door. They could hear the reverend swiveling his axe head, striking a whole in the drywall as he did so.

“Allie, ollie oxenfree!” he yammered drunkenly, as though intoxicated with the idea of chopping them up into little bits.

They took the corner at full throttle and came to the back door. There was a single bolt lock there. Lysander turned it, heard it click and yanked at the door.

It wouldn’t move.

Step, drag. Step, drag. Faster now.

In his panic, he thought they were finished. That this door too was little more than a decoy. Then Sam stuck a hand past him and fumbled with the doorknob. She gave it a half turn until she felt the push button come unlatched. The door flung open and they went spilling outside.

Lysander didn’t stop until he was behind his own front door, locked tight. He stood by the window for awhile to be sure the reverend hadn’t followed them. His parents’ car wasn’t in the driveway either. He remembered his father saying that they were going to a movie at the Davenport. Sam’s leg was still bleeding. He went to the laundry room and emerged a moment later with a rag.

Lysander tied the rag tightly around her upper thigh, and when he was done, he fell back against the stairs, his chest heaving up and down.

The full consequences of what had just happened hit them both at once. Samantha’s hand loosened until the knife left her fingers and fell clanging to the floor. The noise startled Lysander. “Where’d you get that?” he asked, pointing at the knife.

She glanced at it, and her eyes turned to pinpricks. “I…huh …” She knew at once that this wasn’t the knife from the kitchen she had pulled from the magnetic rack. That had been a cutting knife. The knife Lysander held was a white handled hunting knife. Bone handle.

“He must have dropped it when I stabbed him in the leg. Must have taken the one I had by mistake.”

Lysander smiled and kissed her lips hard. He pulled away and flicked a string of bloody hair out of her face. “This may be it.”

She shook her head. “May be what?”

“The evidence we need.”

Samantha fixed him squarely. “What did you find upstairs?”

He paused, remembering the room with the formaldehyde, the stuffed animal heads, the jars crammed with the gore, Necra’s body, mutilated. There was no need to tell her that. He did tell her about Avery and the daily planner.

“I don’t understand. What’s the connection?” she asked. Her eyes were still puffy and red.

“I’m not sure. But that first time Avery brought me back, all those hundreds of years, I knew something wasn’t right with him. His face went pale, like a ghost had come up and bitten him in the ass.” Lysander rose. “You’ve got to bring this knife to your father.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, laying a worried hand on his shoulder. “What are you gonna do?”

He smiled, but she already knew.

When Lysander arrived at Avery’s, he found the basement window unlocked. Not that it really mattered much since he was going to put a rock through it if need be, but there was no sense in drawing any unnecessary attention to what he was about to do. He slid through the narrow opening face first, his ribs squeezed by the tiny window frame. A misplaced thought came to him then. About how a newborn baby must feel, birthed into the world, cold and cramped, knowing fear for the first time. Fear of the strange and the unknown. And more than one unknown was running through Lysander’s head just then, as his hands scrambled for a wobbly bookshelf propped below him. That Avery was somehow involved in this whole business was an idea he found hard to grasp. Harder still was the notion that some invisible clock was ticking away and when that clock reached zero, the curtain would fall forever on his one man play, its working title, Lysander: alienation and true love found too late.

With difficulty, he swung his mind back to the task at hand. With Samantha on her way to her father, wielding the only solid piece of evidence they had, he felt strangely certain that something here would explain why the reverend was trying so desperately to kill him. Just as that last thought blinked on in his head, an image of a man’s face flashed before his mind’s eye and in such vivid detail he might have reached out and touched it. The face was stern and marked with deep intersecting lines. But in spite of the wrinkles, this was not an old man. A silver buckled hat rested squarely on his head. Dark, ancient thoughts seeped into Lysander’s awareness, forming into red letters from a time long dead to the world. Blood dripped from the edges.

Power

As quickly as it came, the image was gone. He had seen the thin man’s face many a night as he skated along that ill-defined ledge of semi-consciousness. It was the man Avery had showed him in the regression. The one with the broad-brimmed hat sitting at the head of other men also in broad-brimmed hats, looking on as that poor woman, tortured and bleeding, was burned to a crisp.

The chilly mist that emanated from the man’s aura was a familiar one and it occurred to Lysander now that if there was such a thing as past lives, that wrinkled face must have belonged to the reverend.

Another time. Another life.

A nervous laugh skittered out of him, and he clamped a hand over his lips. He wanted to change the subject, but he couldn’t hide from it any longer. In part because he couldn’t help wondering if it were true. Supposing, just for the sake of argument that the reverend and the skinny man in the long black cloak were one and the same, did that then make him the witch condemned to death? The crushing sense of alienation fit. So too did the feeling he had carried with him all his life of being damned out of hand for not conforming. But was the universe that cruel? Were we destined to return again and again, he wondered, clad in a rotating wardrobe of costumes so that some remote and aloof deity could watch reruns of the same pathetic cosmic play? It seemed insane. Or maybe just insane enough to be true.

Lysander flicked his light over a pair of filing cabinets tucked behind Avery’s wide oak desk. The room had become a lot more disheveled since he was last here. Papers were heaped and littered on every available surface. On one table a half eaten apple was acting as a browning paperweight. He opened the cabinet and found, to his surprise, files that were neatly organized and alphabetical.

Allcott, Jim

Aloe, Sarah

Babich, Dora

He shut it and opened the bottom one.

Reynolds, Eric

Roberts, Jack

He was getting close.

Sims, Kathleen

Small, Nathaniel

Bingo!

He yanked the reverend’s file with the cold efficiency of a banker pulling up a loan application. With the back of his hand he swept everything off Avery’s desk. He set the file down, opened the cover and scanned the pages. The paper smelled like an old sock. The print had faded with age and was hard to make out in places. It didn’t help that Avery’s handwriting looked like something right out of a kindergarten arts and crafts primer. He opened the file to 1965. He found it divided according to visits. Notes followed each visit.

“Subject: Nathaniel Small…complaining of bouts of extreme rage…outwardly he seems composed and gentlemanly…flashes of deep-seated anger…his eyes…uncanny…spoke of a dream he had last night that a boy came to him lost. He took him in to stay the night and couldn’t fight the urge to touch the boy. When the boy resisted his advances, he killed him and consumed the boy’s genitals …

The notes went on.

Still no clear source for Small’s uncontrollable anger. We spoke of his childhood today. Subject described how his mother, a devout Baptist, would hold a smoldering cigarette to his eye and oblige him to recite the book of Revelation. A small circular scar over this right eye is consistent with the burn from a cigarette. Prescribed 10 mg of Miodeen, twice daily. Suggested hypnotherapy for root cause of Small’s condition. Patient accepted.

Lysander skimmed through pages until something caught his eye.

“Regressed Small to childhood. Not much there. When asked to return to the cause of his feelings of anger, the patient lapsed into a fantasy where he saw himself in colonial Millingham. Asked him to repeat the name and he confirmed it was Millingham…described a stake surrounded by wood saturated in a flammable liquid. Says the town had gathered to witness an execution. A woman charged with practicing the dark arts (witchcraft?)…was about to die ... noticeable change in the patient’s voice …”

The noise from the office door made Lysander jump. “Would it help if I turned on a light?” Avery asked. He was standing in the doorway, his face darkened.

Lysander held the file in the air. “You never told me about Reverend Small…you—”

“I told you, my man. Fantasy. At least that’s what I thought it was before you came along. Harmless fantasy, played out by a mind eager to respond to hypnotic suggestions. The mind will do almost anything to please, to camouflage a person’s pain, to dress it up in whatever way it can.”

“This is no fantasy.”

“No, you’re right,” Avery replied reflectively. “This is no fantasy.”

“Then what is it?”

“I shouldn’t be telling you… patient confiden—”

“Stop it, Avery! People are dying…and I’m next. You could have stopped this fifty years ago and you didn’t.”

Avery fell into one of the plush leather chairs. He swallowed and his throat made an audible clicking noise. “Kids out of college are so full of piss and vinegar, you know that? No, you probably don’t. Well, they are. I sure as hell was. Twenty-six, my own practice, a head the size of a carnival balloon.

“Then along comes a man who would one day become Reverend Small. Bethlehem Baptist’s finest. A young guy from the deep South with one hell of a chip on his shoulder. He had assaulted a police officer. Did you see that when you were snooping through my things? No? Court ordered him to see me for a temper that had put him before a judge on more than one occasion. In those early days I thought I could do anything. Fix anyone. Change the goddamned world!” A contemplative smile crept up on his lips and remained there a second before fading away. “School in the sixties had a nasty habit of doing that to people.”

Lysander stood behind the desk.

Avery went on. “When he came to me, I could sense the darker parts …” He paused. It didn’t last more than a second, but it was enough to make the skin on Lysander’s arms rise in tiny hackles. “I could feel them begging for release. We delved into this past-life fantasy of his for weeks. I thought living out these fantasies in a controlled environment might free him from them, but the grip grew tighter. As though his true self was stirring awake. I could see glimpses of what was happening, but I didn’t do anything to stop it. Not until the momentum was too great. He took up God not long after and I didn’t quite understand it at first and now that I met you, it’s beginning to make sense.”